Imagine that the world’s most celebrated fresco, studied and analyzed for hundreds of years, yields hidden messages, undiscovered for five centuries. Consider one of Catholicism's most revered chapels, the very symbol of the Vatican itself, is filled with representations of Jewish doctrine and messages of reconciliation between the faiths. These are the provocative contentions of the new book The Secrets of The Sistine Chapel: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican(HarperOne, $26.95) by Roy Doliner and Rabbi Benjamin Blech. The authors believe that Michelangelo drew heavily on the Jewish doctrine of Kabbalah and Jewish culture in designing the Sistine Chapel.

The great artist came to the Vatican in 1503 at the behest of Pope Julius II who asked Michelangelo, whose great passion was sculpture, to craft that Pope’s tomb, which would be set in the center of St. Peter’s Basilica. However, after he arrived, he was reassigned to repaint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo argued with Pope Julius and even tried to run away from Rome, only to be brought back to finish the assignment. Scholars have long thought that the artist head messages of protest against the Pope in his great painting. The discoveries in this new book, however, go beyond the insults identified by art historians to date. Here are some of the secrets Doliner and Blech have revealed:

• Pope Julius commissioned Michelangelo to paint a series of portraits of Jesus and the Apostles on the Sistine ceiling; in fact, it is the Old Testament heroes and heroines who play starring roles on the ceiling

• In the Original Sin panel, Michelangelo painted the Forbidden Tree of knowledge not as an apple tree, but rather as a fig tree, as written in the Talmud.

• Over the altar where Mary was supposed to be, he placed the Jewish prophet Jonah, whose hands and legs form two Hebrew letters, sending a message of religious tolerance to all those being oppressed.

In his introduction to The Sistine Secrets, Professor Enrico Bruschini, author, renowned expert on the Sistine Chapel and Vatican Museums, and the Official Art Historian of the American Embassy in Rome writes, “What has hardly ever been stressed before is an idea that Blech and Doliner demonstrate with brilliant insight. While the Renaissance was certainly influenced by the ancient Greek and Roman myths, we need to at last acknowledge the remarkable influence, especially on Michelangelo, of the hermetic and esoteric traditions of the Jewish Kabbalah.” [Note: Bruschini was profiled in the April 2005 issue of Dream of Italy.]

The book and its fascinating assertions have gained much media attention. The Sistine Secrets was the subject of an ABC News 20/20 special earlier this month. Dream of Italy contributor Frances Kidd sat down with co-author Roy Doliner (a tour guide and Jewish culture and history expert) to discuss his work:

DOI: First, congratulations on your new book. It looks like this will be getting a lot of attention in the coming weeks.
RD: That’s right. The book was released 500 years to the week that Michelangelo started working on the [Sistine Chapel] ceiling.

DOI: I guess we can assume the release date is not an accident?
RD: The fact that it’s coming out this year is a happy accident. I picked May 10th as the formal release date of the book. The actual date Michelangelo started working on the ceiling was May 10, 1508, so it’s exactly 500 years to the day.

DOI: Can you tell us first how this book came about?
RD: The Rabbi and I are both convinced that this book was “bashert,” which is Yiddish for “meant to be.” Rabbi Blech and I met when Pope John Paul II was gravely ill and did something very unusual. Normally, when a Pope realizes he is dying, he receives a blessing from “big shots” in his religion. This Pope, in addition to his own church, asked 160 of the world’s top rabbis and cantors to come to Rome to bless him in a private audience. Rabbi Blech was part of that group and, in addition, was selected to be one of three rabbis who participated in the “laying on of hands” for the Pope.

DOI: Was this seen as unusual at the time?
RD: This Pope did a lot of things in his life that were seen as unusual. For example, he was the first Pope to visit the Synagogue in Rome and he went to the Wailing Wall and put a private prayer in the wall. I think that, because he grew up around a lot of Jews in his little village outside Krakow, Poland, they were not these strange, infidel beings to him…they were his friends and neighbors. So, for him it was quite normal.

DOI: And how did you get involved with this esteemed group?
RD: I was called in to serve as a special docent for this group while they were in Rome. The Vatican had assigned one of their top experts to be the guide for the group, to take them privately into the Sistine before it opened to the public. This guy is an excellent guide but he just had the wrong crowd that day. He only knew what the church had told him to say and he couldn’t answer the Rabbi’s questions about anything not connected with the church. I was there but I put myself in the back on purpose because I didn’t want to say anything; I didn’t want to step on anybody’s toes. Anyway, I said, “Do you mind if I answer?” He graciously agreed so I started answering questions, and pretty soon I ended up involuntarily taking everybody around and showing them some of the secrets that I had discovered.

DOI: So you had already seen and studied some of the secrets in the book?
RD: I have spent a lot of time in the Sistine Chapel over the years…in fact, it turns out, that I’m the first religious Jew to spend a lot of time, many, many visits for many years, in the Sistine Chapel and the clues were there just waiting for somebody to understand them. You know I started off telling people, “it’s funny, isn’t it, that almost looks like it’s a Jewish symbol.” I didn’t share them with many people because I was very skeptical from the beginning but after seeing hundreds and hundreds of things in Michelangelo’s work and researching his life, I figured out that these weren’t accidents; this was all planned.

DOI: So you weren’t really looking for anything? You just started noticing similarities to your culture?
RD: It’s like if you walked into some temple in the heart of Africa or India where no American had ever been before and you see representations of Betsy Ross sewing the stars and stripes or George Washington crossing the Delaware or a bearded guy in a very high stove pipe hat, you’d say, “somebody in here knew something about my culture.” Somebody is trying to put things from my culture in this strange sanctuary. And that’s what happened with me. I saw stuff from my culture and my heritage all over his works.

DOI: So, did you tell some of the stories to this group and they sort of sparked with Rabbi Blech or how did the two of you get together on this?
RD: Well, Rabbi Blech comes up to me, he’s very modest, and he says, “I write a little bit. [he has actually had a number of books published.] Have you thought of writing a book?” I said, “some year, some day down the line.” He said, “I’m a writer; do you want to work together?” And that night a dinner was arranged so the two of us could sit next to each other at table; we were better introduced. So, anyway, we decided we would write together. And that’s how it started; it was all meant to be.

DOI: Sounds like it certainly was. So, did you start right away? How long did it take from the start?
RD: We wrote a proposal with which we got an agent, who also felt this book was meant to be. But we got over 40 rejections to the initial proposal. Some publishers thought we were trying to rip off Dan Brown; many were quite upset that we refused to make this into a novel. We ended up having to rewrite the proposal a couple of times, almost to make it like lawyers preparing a brief because people were so resistant to the idea. But our proposal was backed up by a great deal of scholarly evidence. Without making it become dry as dust, it had to be totally believable; but also we had to make it really accessible, fun.

DOI: I can see how these ideas could be uncomfortable for some people.
RD: Very, very uncomfortable for some people.

DOI: So, I’m curious, does the Vatican know about this yet? Are we expecting a reaction?
RD: Nobody ever knows what the Vatican knows or doesn’t know.

DOI Are we concerned about that?
RD: We’ll find out, we’ll find out. I think word is out among the staff of the museum; whether that has filtered through to the hierarchy, I don’t know. I do know that when they filmed the documentary, there had to be one of their people to take the ABC crew in and I was excluded.

DOI: Do you think the Vatican will consider this an affront?
RD: If they can understand that Michelangelo was really angry with the church and the pope five centuries ago, then we’re okay. The book is not intended to be insult to the current pope or the current church. In the book, we quote at length from John Paul II; we sing the praises of John XXIII.

The book is saying that the church now, 500 years later, is catching up to what Michelangelo was putting on their walls five centuries earlier. So, we’re saying it’s a message that took 500 years to arrive but that the church is catching up with Michelangelo’s vision of its future. So, if they see it in that light, they could be very happy with the book. If they see it as offensive because it’s talking about some dark spots on the church’s history five centuries ago, they’re not going to like the book.

One thing I know will not be happy-making for the church or the Vatican Museum. The average visit to the chapel is somewhere between five to 15 minutes, max. Now, we anticipate people will be carrying the book in to look for all their favorite secrets. That’s going to take more than five or 10 minutes and they’re going to be spending a lot more time in the chapel; that’s not going to be pleasing, just for logistics.

DOI: Did you have a favorite secret you can even give me a hint about and then we can go find it in the book? Or was there something that really shouted out to you of out of all these things that you found?
RD: There are so many favorite secrets in there. I’ll tell you what Prof. Bruschini says is the thing that put him over the edge; when he knew our story was absolutely true. Michelangelo put two guys who are obviously Jewish over Jesus’ shoulder in the inner circle of the elect, blessed souls in Heaven. One has his finger pointed upwards to Heaven just as Noah does on the ceiling saying that they believe in one God. They are dressed in the caps of shame that the Church imposed on the Jews as a punishment for being Jewish in Michelangelo’s lifetime. One has a hat that has two points on it that looks like it’s covering up devil horns and the other has a yellow cap. Yet, here they are in heaven hovering over Jesus and an angel is pointing them out. And they are indisputably Jewish. This is against church teachings; totally in the face of the teaching of the Catholic Church and the Vatican in the 1500’s, what Michelangelo does in the Last Judgment of Jesus on the altar wall.

DOI: As you began to study the things you found, did you discover other sources of documentation. Had others also had these thoughts?
RD: There’s a lot of documentation where people say “there’s stuff up there we don’t understand.” This is the first time that there is a truly organic explanation of these very strange symbols all over the frescoes of the Sistine.

On the ABC special, I don’t know if it will make it on to the final cut (it didn’t), but at one point, I was asked, “I don’t see anything obscene, I don’t see the angels making obscene gestures at representation of Pope Julius II; I think that’s just your imagination.” I said, “well, then you’re contradicting the Catholic Church itself.” In the Council of Trent in 1534, all the top honchos in the Catholic faith took out a lot of very precious time to discuss, and formally condemn, the obscene gestures and the obscenities and heresies that Michelangelo put inside the Sistine Chapel. So, I told ABC, “if you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe the Catholic Church.”

Ross King, the author of Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling talks about the obscene gesture to the pope that are up there on the ceiling. He also gave me other clues, including pointing out that the tree up there with the forbidden fruit is a fig tree, not an apple tree. So, Ross King mentions it but for him, not having a Jewish background, wouldn’t know the significance of the fig tree.

[Note from The Sistine Secrets: “Michelangelo chose a rabbinical interpretation of the biblical story over the traditional Christian one: In the Talmud, one learns that God never presents a difficulty unless he has already created it solution. They propose the Tree of Knowledge is a fig tree, rather than the apple tree that is usually portrayed. The immediate result of Adam and Eve’s transgression was awareness of their own nudity, and the Bible teaches that they covered themselves with fig leaves. According to the Talmud, a compassionate God had provided the cure for the consequences of the sin from the same object that had caused it.”]

DOI: Do we know why Michelangelo was interested in these symbols, these messages, even in the Kabbalah?
RD: It’s all in the book…He got the best private education available in Western Europe. He was informally adopted by a certain family in Florence called the de’ Medicis. He grew up with their kids as a teenager, he ate at the table with the richest, most privileged children in Europe and had their same private tutors

[DOI Note: Living and studying with the children of the de’ Medici family, Michelangelo was exposed to the leading thinkers and philosophers of the day. He studied Plato and secular humanism; he also studied Judaism, ideas that he would not have been familiar with if he had been taught by masters of Renaissance thinking. It has been said it was the equivalent of an Ivy League education today. ]

DOI: In addition, I guess you’ve been thinking about this for a long time, seeing these images; was there anything that was a surprise to you as you started actually formalizing this and researching a book?
RD: We were constantly surprised by what we found out. And more secrets continue to be reveals. One that is not in the book because it became known after the book was printed.…Recently, the bodies of two of Michelangelo’s private tutors in the palace of the de’ Medici family were exhumed. We had written about these tutors and the assumption that they were early victims of the syphilis outbreak in Florence in the end of the 1400’s. But after doing forensic analysis of their hair and bones; it was discovered massive amounts of arsenic in their remains. As soon as Lorenzo de' Medici died, these two men died within a very short time of each other. So, probably Savonarola or other people from the church did away with them because they were teaching too much Judaism to Christians.

DOI: You mentioned earlier that visitors to the Sistine Chapel may be spending a longer time in there looking for these, or their own secrets. Are you going to do a special customized tour around this?
RD: The cultural association (see “Touring Rome’s Jewish Ghetto”)has already been conducting these tours for two or three months. We are the only authorized Sistine Secrets tours.

[See Doliner’s website, www.roydoliner.com, for a new Sistine secret every month.]