The Sistine Secrets Read Free

last two titles published by the Vatican itself. In 1984, he was named Official Art Historian of the United States Embassy in Rome, a lifelong title, and was subsequently appointed Fine Art Curator. In 1989 he was named the Official Guide of Rome and guided Presidents Gerald Ford, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush during their official visits to Rome and Vatican City. To learn more about him, please visit his site at: www.profenrico.com, or write him at enricobruschini@ libero.it.

PREFACE
     

    Every year more than four million visitors from all over the world throng to the Vatican Museums, the most-visited museum complex on earth. They come for one overriding reason—to see the Sistine Chapel, the holiest chapel in the Christian world. Viewers—Christians, Jews, Muslims, atheists, art lovers, and the merely curious—not only marvel at its aesthetic beauty but are moved by its history and its spiritual teachings. The major attraction, without a doubt, is the incomparable vista of frescoes on its ceiling and its altar wall, the work of Michelangelo Buonarroti, universally acknowledged as one of humanity’s greatest artists.
    But very few of the millions of awestruck spectators who enter the Sistine know that the pope’s own chapel, built in the heart of the Vatican, is a full-size copy of the Holy of Holies in Solomon’s ancient Temple in Jerusalem.
    They would also surely be amazed to discover that Michelangelo himself embedded secret messages inside the chapel. Even more shocking, these messages espoused ideas that struck at the heart of the papacy.
    Unknown to most viewers is the dramatic truth that these frescoes contain a lost mystical message of universal love, dangerously contrary to Church doctrine in Michelangelo’s day, but true to the original teachings of the Bible as well as to much of contemporary liberal Christian thought.
    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.
    Unfortunately these messages were lost and went unheeded for five centuries. The man famous for defining genius as “eternal patience” must have found solace for his inability to voice his disagreement with the Vatican in the hope that eventually there would be those who would “crack his code” and grasp what he was really saying. Only now, thanks to diligent scholarship as well as the new clarity afforded by the chapel’s extensive cleaning, have they been rediscovered and deciphered. Michelangelo spoke truth to power, and his insights, ingeniously concealed in his work, can at last be heard.
    All this is not speculative fiction, but, as we will convincingly prove, completely, incredibly, true.
    This is the startling and provocative thesis that The Sistine Secrets will for the first time reveal—and forcefully demonstrate. It will show how Michelangelo incorporated into his religious masterpiece a stunning number of hidden messages to the Church of his time, messages that resonate to this day with their daring appeal for reconciliation between reason and faith, between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, and among all those who share a sincere quest for true faith and service of God.
    Prepare to unlearn everything that you thought you knew about the Sistine Chapel and Michelangelo’s masterpieces. Just as the recent cleaning of the frescoes removed layer after layer of tarnish and darkness accumulated over the centuries, this book will endeavor to remove centuries of prejudice, censorship, and ignorance from one of the world’s