The first religious Jew to be authorized by the Vatican to act as a docent in Catholic museums, bestselling author Roy Doliner’s life seems like it could be taken directly from a Dan Brown novel.
Labelled by the Italian media as “Rome’s Jewish Robert Langdon,” Mr. Doliner conducts tours of the Sistine chapel for the high-profile politicians, ambassadors and celebrities. A playwright and the author of four books, the most recent of which The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo’s Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican, is slated to become a Discovery Channel documentary.
His findings caused a stir in the church: he said he found signs in the works of Michelangelo that suggest the famous Renaissance painter had studied Jewish wisdom literature — such as the Kabbalah — and hid symbols in his paintings. The Post spoke with Mr. Doliner during his recent visit to Calgary where he lectured on behalf of Congregation House of Jacob-Mikveh Israel, the city’s oldest Jewish organization.
Q: Can you tell me why they call you “Rome’s Jewish Robert Langdon”?
A: The Italian media, they love nicknames and because whenever there’s a mystery in the art history world, when there’s an artwork that they’ve not been able to figure out who made it or what it’s really saying, I get called in.
Q: Why do you get called in?
A: Because of the book I wrote. Sistine Secrets sounds like a Dan Brown novel except this is all true. It’s all documented, it’s all accepted. It was my dumb luck to decode the Sistine chapel.
He was extremely angry at the scandals and abuses of power he was seeing every day in the Vatican
Q: How did you stumble upon that particular mystery?
A: My friends in the Vatican — and thank goodness I have a lot of friends in the Vatican — tell me I’m the first religious Jew to spend enormous amounts of time in the Sistine Chapel. And what was being said by the authorized Vatican guides and the authorized Vatican guidebooks didn’t jibe with what Michelangelo was painting on the ceiling.
And I started to notice Jewish stuff and I thought it was just my imagination. I was enormously skeptical. It took years and years of research. I found out Michelangelo was a devout Christian his entire life, but at the age of 13, he was introduced to a private tutor that taught him Jewish wisdom literature and he went nuts over it and kept on quoting it visually.
Q: Can you give me an example of the kind of Jewish stuff you were noticing in the Sistine Chapel?
A: Well, here’s one thing. What’s the forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden?
Q: Isn’t there some debate over whether it’s a pomegranate or an apple?
A: That’s right, and the standard tradition. However, in the original Jewish tradition, in the Talmud, they figure out it’s a fig tree. God always gives us the solution to a problem hidden inside the problem itself so when Adam and Eve figured out they were stark naked, the solution to the problem is a fig leaf. According to Talmudic logic, if the fig leaf was nearby, guess what else would need to be nearby.
In almost all of Western art, it’s the apple tree and the forbidden apple. Yet you go to the Sistine chapel and all the fruits connected with the forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden are figs.
Every single panel on the ceiling, there’s not a single Christian figure, not a single Christian symbol. It’s all Jewish stuff.
Q: Can you tell me about a few more examples you found?
A: For instance, in the last judgement over the altar, right in the inner circle of saintly souls surrounding Jesus and Mary in paradise [Michelangelo] sneaks in two Orthodox Jews. That’s blasphemy in the 1500s, and the Vatican didn’t know they were there until the book came out.
Q: But you’re not asserting that Michelangelo was Jewish?
A: No, no, he was a devout Christian his entire life. What he’s putting into his art works — and we know this because he put it in his private letters — was that as a religious Christian, he was extremely angry at the scandals and abuses of power he was seeing every day in the Vatican.
Q: Why did he pick Jewish symbolism to express this anger, and why didn’t he get caught?
A: Back then, he had three different papal censors looking after his every move, spying on him, but he locked out that staff and brought in five childhood friends from Florence. On the day he finished the painting, he destroyed the special scaffolding he built to paint the ceiling so nobody else could get back up there to closely inspect it unless they wanted to render the chapel unusable for several years. His engineering skills saved the ceiling.
Meanwhile, the censors had figured out all the hidden codes the other artists were using, whether they were birds, flowers, gestures or positions. References to Greco-Roman myth, for instances, they knew that inside and out. One thing they didn’t know was the deep end of the pool, Jewish wisdom literature, the Talmud, parables and, of course, the Kabbalah.
It was like a message in a bottle waiting 500 years.
Q: How did the Vatican react when the book came out?
A: At first they were in high dudgeon. There were some holdouts when it came out, but now they are thrilled with the message; Michelangelo was looking for inter-religious brotherhood and that’s what we say in the book. He was making a bridge, he was bridging the Christian faith and the Jewish faith. That might sound cliche and banal in 2013, but we’re talking about five centuries ago. That could get you burned alive in public.
Rabbi Benjamin Blech, co-author of The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo’s Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican, talks about Jewish symbols embedded in the Sistine chapel