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The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican | 
 enlarge | Authors: Benjamin Blech, Roy Doliner
Publisher: HarperOne
Category: Book
List Price: $26.95
Buy New: $16.93
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New (27) from $16.93
Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 696
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 5.8 x 1.3
ISBN: 0061469041
Dewey Decimal Number: 759.5
EAN: 9780061469046
ASIN: 0061469041
Publication Date: May 1, 2008 (New: Last 30 Days)
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Condition: Brand New Book but dust cover slightly damaged on top but the poster is fine, Fast Shipping
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Product Description
Five hundred years ago Michelangelo began work on a painting that became one of the most famous pieces of art in the world—the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Every year millions of people come to see Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling, which is the largest fresco painting on earth in the holiest of Christianity's chapels; yet there is not one single Christian image in this vast, magnificent artwork. The Sistine Secrets tells the fascinating story of how Michelangelo embedded messages of brotherhood, tolerance, and freethinking in his painting to encourage "fellow travelers" to challenge the repressive Roman Catholic Church of his time. "Driven by the truths he had come to recognize during his years of study in private nontraditional schooling in Florence, truths rooted in his involvement with Judaic texts as well as Kabbalistic training that conflicted with approved Christian doctrine, Michelangelo needed to find a way to let viewers discern what he truly believed. He could not allow the Church to forever silence his soul. And what the Church would not permit him to communicate openly, he ingeniously found a way to convey to those diligent enough to learn his secret language."—from the Preface Blech and Doliner reveal what Michelangelo meant in the angelic representations that brilliantly mocked his papal patron, how he managed to sneak unorthodox heresies into his ostensibly pious portrayals, and how he was able to fulfill his lifelong ambition to bridge the wisdom of science with the strictures of faith. The Sistine Secrets unearths secrets that have remained hidden in plain sight for centuries.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Transparent Attempt to Capitalize on the Success of "The Da Vinci Code" May 3, 2008
0 out of 43 found this review helpful
This book is easily one of the poorest excuses for scholarship that I have ever encountered. The authors blatantly engage in the single biggest sin for a historian -- interpreting historical events through a contemporary (and biased) lens, and make laughably absurd claims, ranging from reading an innocuous hand position in a fresco as an obscene gesture aimed at the pope to declaring the depiction of another figure's backside as Michelangelo "mooning" Julius II.
There's a reason why this book has been uniformly dismissed as frivolous nonsense by authorities in the fields of both Renaissance history and art history; namely, there's not even the slightest shred of historical or artistic substantiation for the authors' fanciful hypothesis that Michelangelo included secret symbols in the frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel insulting the pope, promoting Jewish mysticism (i.e., the celebrity fad known as "Kabbalah"), and encouraging "bridge-building" to the Jewish faith. The authors, who happen to be Jewish themselves, flagrantly project their own twenty-first century attitudes onto Michelangelo's work of art from 500 years ago, leading them to interpret it based on what they wish it to represent rather than what it actually does.
The fact of the matter is that the authors here shamelessly and transparently attempted to capitalize on the runaway success of "The DaVinci Code" by co-opting the formula for Dan Brown's novel (Renaissance artist + famous work of art + esoteric symbolism involving Church-related controversy) and simply swapping Leonardo and his Mona Lisa with Michelangelo and his Sistine Chapel. Brown at least had the intellectual integrity to limit his imagination to the world of fiction. The hacks who authored this work of pseudo-scholarship disgracefully and dishonestly try to pass off their fantasy as history.
Brazenly unheedful of the historical method, lacking substantiation and truth, derivative of a premise stolen from a novel, and utterly ridiculous in every conceivable way, this book is beneath contempt and not worth the paper it is printed on.
 Amazing, in a good way :-) May 1, 2008
13 out of 14 found this review helpful
Bought it the day it came out and couldn't put it down.
The book was fascinating, plausible and thought provoking.
I'd say the best description of the content is that it is a clever mix:
*Parts of it takes respected ideas that other scholars have noted (like Ross King's suggestion re. flipping the bird, fyi to the other reviewer), and expand them
*Parts of it respond to famous questions asked about the ceiling -and provide new theories, many of which to my mind were as credible as the "accepted" answers, or more.
The tone was great...with a sprinkling of stories, facts, pictures, and wow-moments of revelation.
The best punch line of all: 500 years ago, Michelangelo basically said what Pope John Paul did so recently -that the Church has Jewish roots and the Church should embrace that heritage. Michelangelo didn't want to become Jewish -he wanted to be a better Christian and usher in an age where all religions learn from each other.
Wouldn't it be nice if that would happen already? :(
Anyway, I highly recommend this book!
A Scholarly Debacle May 1, 2008
3 out of 61 found this review helpful
'Standing on a whale fishing for minnows' is about the most apt remark that can be said about this highly hyped and overrated work of Rabbi Benjamin Blech and Roy Doliner. The work reads and feels like a teenage prank one would expect to see in school yards. They literally accuse Michelangelo of giving the pope the bird (the finger). These are suppose to be highly respected art historians that have written a work that will be pondered by the art world for centuries to come.
These so-called art historians claim to know what esotericism and Kabbalah is all about, which was use profusely throughout the artwork of the Sistine Chapel. But these art historians were blind to it all. They are like the blind man touching different parts of the elephant trying to figure out what it is.
They accuse the Medici family (undeclared rulers of Florence) of sending his best artists to the Sistine Chapel to spoof the entire project inserting into their art insults and jives esoterically that are unbefitting a religous person's sensibility. The entire hierarchy of the Catholic Church: pope, cardinals and theologians were suppose to be totally ignorant of any of this spoofing allegedly hidden in the art work. These artists, which included Michelangelo painted the chapel for over a span of about an eighty year period and none of it was suppose to be coordinated by the Church hierarchy, which these authors take as idiots of the highest order.
The Sistine Chapel is endowed with an overall purpose using esoteric and Kabbalistic teachings: see my academically published paper {THE SISTINE CHAPEL: A Study in Celestial Cartography}, which can be read online. Here you will find that every piece of artwork on the floor, walls and ceiling come together in a unified design to send a very special spiritual mesaage to all that view it properly.
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