MOSCOW, February 4 - RIA Novosti. Italian scientists analyzed portraits of Michelangelo Buonarroti and concluded that he suffered from degenerative arthrosis of the hands, which, however, did not prevent him from creating due to the fact that his tendency to constantly work slowed down the destruction of bones, according to an article published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.
Michelangelo is rightfully considered one of the greatest artists and sculptors of the Renaissance and all of humanity in general - over the 89 years of his life he created many greatest masterpieces, many of which, such as the fresco “The Last Judgment”, the statues “David” and “The Dying Slave”, determined the development of European culture for decades and centuries to come.
One of the main secrets of Michelangelo remained, according to Davide Lazari from the University of Florence (Italy), how the great artist worked in his advanced years, if, according to the recollections of his nephew Lionardo Simoni, he suffered from serious problems with joint mobility, which most biographers of Buonarroti consider to be a consequence of the development of gout.
Lazzeri and his colleagues doubted this and carefully studied what the master’s hands looked like in recent years before his death, and also re-analyzed all known sources about his life, including portraits of the artist, autobiographies of other contemporaries and memoirs of relatives and friends.
Thanks to portraits made at different periods of Michelangelo's life - at 60, 65 and 70 years old - the authors of the article were able to reveal what the artist actually suffered by comparing how the maestro's left hand looked in them. According to them, Buonarroti did experience serious pain in the joints, but the cause of their appearance was not gout, the accumulation of urea crystals, but degenerative arthrosis.
This is supported by special deformations in the joints of the thumb, metacarpal bones and a number of other elements of the hand, as well as the absence in the vicinity of these bones of visible traces of inflammation, which are usually associated with the development of gout. The destruction of these joints as a result of degenerative processes deprived Michelangelo of the ability to write, as his thumb effectively ceased to bend.
Considering that the great artist lived for at least another 15 years after painting these portraits, the question arises, how did he manage to fight the disease? According to Lazzeri and his colleagues, Michelangelo was both helped and hindered by his desire to constantly work - all the time working through pain, the artist slowed down the destruction of the joints and adapted to the constant limitation in their mobility.
Ceiling Sistine Chapel has been captivating the imagination of visitors for more than five hundred years. Every year, a great work of art attracts millions of tourists and occupies a special place not only in world art, but also in Christianity.
History of frescoes
Michelangelo Buonarroti began this ambitious project at the age of 33, in 1508. The chapel was opened to the public in 1512. The ceiling was difficult for him and, according to Michelangelo himself, no amount of money would be enough to pay for his hellish torment and the sacrifices that he was forced to make.
He painted all the frescoes while standing, and not lying on his back, as many believe. Raising my arms and head up for hours on end resulted in terrible headaches and muscle spasms.
The spread of fungus across the ceiling meant that the first layer of frescoes had to be completely removed. After the ceiling was dry again, Michelangelo prepared and applied the primer himself to prevent the fungus from spreading again.
The chief architect of the Vatican, Donato Bramante, did not really like Michelangelo (probably because he patronized Raphael) and did not try to provide him with comfort, so Michelangelo had to design his own scaffolding, on which it would be convenient to work on painting the high ceilings of the chapel.
In addition, Michelangelo did not consider himself an artist, since he was already a famous sculptor at that time, whose works (David and Pieta) were striking in their beauty and realism. At the request of Pope Julius II, he had to take on the task of painting the chapel, but the artist insisted on reserving the right to choose the subjects.
Result of work
As a result, Michelangelo, an aspiring artist, managed to create one of greatest works world art, which to this day intrigues and delights all connoisseurs of beauty.
Despite the hellish conditions and the incredible amount of work (more than a thousand square meters), Michelangelo depicted nine scenes from the Old Testament, including more than three hundred human figures depicted in real size. These images and incredibly accurate anatomy have inspired generations of artists and scientists. The Creation of Adam fresco, in which the fingers of God and Adam almost touch, is one of the most recognizable and copied works of art in human history.
Hidden symbols
Although in 1508 the high Renaissance was at its peak, the church was still extremely strict, did not like and in every possible way suppressed the attempts of great minds to spread too progressive ideas.
That is why the assumption that one of the greatest artists of history managed to hide secret symbols in his very famous work, are exciting and intriguing in their own right.
Not all symbols, however, were so secret. For example, in gratitude for the fact that Pope Julius II allowed Michelangelo to change the subjects of the frescoes, the artist depicted acorns on many of them.
What's the point? The fact is that the pope’s last name was Rovere, translated from Italian as oak.
Symbols of Judaism
Acorns were not the only piece of hidden symbolism that Michelangelo included in his work.
In the depiction of the Fall and expulsion from Paradise, there is no infamous apple tree in the Garden of Eden. In its place stands a fig tree - traditional element Jewish religion, not Christianity.
In fact, in many scenes from the Old Testament, Michelangelo actively uses Jewish symbolism. According to historians and art critics, the artist was thus trying to send a message to the church that Christianity had strayed too far from its Jewish roots.
Image of God
However, Michelangelo himself greatly departed from Judaism at the moment when he decided to depict God.
Christianity is the only Abrahamic religion that allows people to create an image of God. Before Michelangelo, Western art depicted God either as a hand or as a source of light, but did not take on a clear physical form.
Michelangelo went against the accepted principles and depicted God in human form. It was this adult bearded man who became the typical image of God for the entire Christian world.
God is mind
Take a close look at the fresco “The Creation of Adam”, namely at the image of God and the angels surrounding him. In 1990, physician Frank Lynn Meshberger discovered that hidden within the image of God and his retinue was an image of the human brain. According to art historians, this suggests that God gave Adam not only life, but also reason.
The image of God and his retinue is so complex that not only its outlines are shaped like a brain, but also individual elements of the fresco (for example, the angel’s leg) almost exactly repeat the outlines of parts of the brain (pituitary gland).
Another brain
A 2010 study of the murals revealed another image of the brain, this time hidden in the mural "Separation of Light from Darkness." Under the high raised chin of God, on his neck, part of the human brain is clearly visible, namely the trunk, part of the temporal lobe and the medulla oblongata.
According to them, Michelangelo, who had been actively studying anatomy on corpses since the age of 15, could not have accidentally depicted such a complex structure on the neck of God - a part of the body that is usually smooth.
Feminine
A Brazilian study published in the journal Clinical Anatomy in 2016 found that in addition to the brain, the artist depicted other internal organs.
Not without the feminine principle. A ram skull, which is depicted eight times on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, closely resembles female reproductive organs, researchers say.
In addition, on the frescoes there are several times triangular shapes depicted with the point down, which has long symbolized the “sacred feminine principle.” This was a popular motif in classical Greco-Roman art. However, this attitude threatened the patriarchy of the Catholic Church.
Unusually for all Western art of the time, women were given a central role in many of the scenes depicted on the chapel ceiling. Considering that the ceiling depicts exclusively scenes from the Old Testament, where the Virgin Mary and Child were not present, such attention to women is truly unexpected.
Today one can only guess whether the hidden symbols were an attempt to deceive the church, remind it of its roots, or pay homage to science, reason and the feminine principle. Or maybe these symbols have completely different meanings, or there are no symbols at all? Or maybe there are many more hidden messages that no one has seen yet?
Nearly 500 years after Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, young medical student Franz Meschberger was preparing for exams in the anatomy theater of the Indianapolis Medical School, and until then he did not realize how close he was to deciphering a message from one of the world's greatest artists. .
Usually he dissected the same corpse, which gave off the cloying and unpleasant smell of formaldehyde, an aroma very familiar to him, but that day he had new item for analysis - a fresh brain.
There were drawings on the table in front of him. famous illustrator Frank Netter's medical benefits. Meshberger approached the task very responsibly, making several drawings before dissecting the brain, comparing them with Netter’s illustrations, then making another series of drawings himself. After spending three hours of intense labor, as was always the case when he worked in the anatomical theater, he realized that he needed to take a break and change his occupation.
Almost immediately, the student began reading a book about Michelangelo and, turning the pages, came across a three-page spread of “The Creation of Adam,” a scene that adorns part of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The fresco depicted God (surrounded by angels and with the unborn Eve under his arm) extending his hand to Adam. Adam leans back and also reaches out his hand to God with a casual gesture.
Meshberger's head, filled with images of the human brain, was determined to see what no one had been able to see before.
“I was immediately struck by the shape of the outline that surrounded God and the angels,” he recalls. “It was exactly the same as the item I had been working on all day!”
Without a doubt, this shape resembled a cross-section of a human brain. “I was overcome with a sense of déjà-vu,” says Meschberger, who admits that at the moment of discovery, goosebumps ran through his body.
The first thing that caught his attention was the hem of the green tunic, which represented the vertebral artery, spiraling up towards the pons. "Then I noticed the elongated leg at the base of the picture. I saw in it the anterior and posterior parts of the pituitary gland. The angel's leg was not five, but two-toed. Then I distinguished a shape reminiscent of the arterial groove and the lateral fissure of the cerebrum, separating the frontal and parietal lobes .
The symbolism of this image is obvious: Adam receives a gift from the Lord God. But this is not a gift of life, because he already lives. H.V. Janson in the book “Fundamentals of Art History” notes that “(Creation) is not a modeling of Adam’s body, but rather the transference to him of the divine breath - the soul.
Since the seat of the soul is the mind, there is a hidden message within the circuits of the brain: God gives Adam a mind. “And the mind is God,” adds Dr. Meshberger.
Dr. Meshberger almost forgot about his discovery. He became an obstetrician-gynecologist, opened his own practice, and helped deliver more than 3,000 babies before returning to the discovery and putting all the elements together into an acceptable theory.
But from time to time he casually asked his friends and acquaintances: “Do you know that Michelangelo’s fresco contains a secret message?” Three years ago, when he became convinced that no one had heard of his theory, his interest in it revived. “I wanted to know if my observation was a common interpretation of the image or something new.”
He continued, in his free time from work, to research the life of Michelangelo and the result made him think. Born in 1475, the artist, who was called the "divine Michelangelo" at the time he sculpted the Pieta of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, was 24 years old. This work made him instantly famous, and the sculpture of David, completed five years later, cemented his reputation as a genius. In 1508, Pope Julius II commissioned him, a sculptor by profession, to paint the entire vault of the Sistine Chapel with a total area of 1,768 square meters. The fact that a master who had almost no experience in fresco painting created a masterpiece in just four years speaks volumes of his genius. The fresco depicts more than three hundred characters and many scenes, only one of which is “The Creation of Adam.”
Dr. Meshberger's enthusiasm grew as his research continued. He never found any mention of the fact that the fresco depicts the outline of a human brain. He began to study the image even more closely and the idea came to his mind to superimpose a slide of the fresco on a transparent drawing of the human brain made by Frank Netter. The result was amazing. “The drawings matched almost completely,” he says, adding in a low, measured, almost graveyard tone: “I just felt creepy.”
It was obvious that the fresco hid much more than Dr. Meshberger thought. “The overlay of slides led me to understand that the back of one of the angels corresponds to the pons, and the lower leg and thigh correspond to the spine.” But that's not all. The right two-toed leg of the angel, bent at the knee (the legs of God and other characters had five toes) represented a cross-section of the optic chiasm, the thigh was the optic nerve, and the leg itself was the optic tract.
These undeniable facts were clearly not mere coincidence. And all of Michelangelo’s work is imbued with soul-touching symbolism. Experts know that his works are fraught with countless mysteries that have not been clarified to this day. They will probably remain this way forever. But is the assumption that in the outlines of the brain Adam receives from God the gift of reason compatible with the life philosophy of Michelangelo himself?
Obviously yes.
Born during the heyday of the Renaissance, the artist adhered to the philosophy of Neoplatonism and, as Dr. Meshberger notes, followers of this school of thought believed, among other things, that “ divine part received by man from the Creator is intelligence.” Michelangelo stated this more than once, both in his poems and in conversations with friends.
If his philosophy coincides with the meaning of the message of the fresco, then what about his knowledge of anatomy? Those who challenge Dr. Meshberger's theory doubt that the master had such advanced anatomical knowledge. Without a doubt, his paintings and sculptures indicate that he knew well the structure of the human body, but we must not forget that the creator devoted a lot of time to dissecting human corpses. The rector of the Florentine church of Santo Spirito placed at his disposal several premises for this purpose. At the time, such activity was illegal and punishable by death unless sanctioned by civil authority. Away from human eyes, Michelangelo could thus safely dissect the brain and study it.
“Macroscopic anatomy,” explains Dr. Meshberger, “consists of removing the entire brain from the skull for the purpose of observing it. And, since you believe that this organ is the seat of the mind, then to depict this function you will draw the brain.
Frescoes are painted on fresh plaster, which absorbs water in which the pigments are suspended. The image thus becomes an integral part of the wall. The plaster itself dries quickly, so a small surface is painted at a time. To avoid costly mistakes, artists prepare detailed sketches on cardboard or paper and redraw them on a surface prepared for painting.
“I believe that’s what Michelangelo did,” says Dr. Meshberger. “His sketch was an outline of a brain, within which he placed images of people, God and angels.”
There is no doubt that the artist was endowed with inspiration, and many of his contemporaries considered him to be a divine creation himself. He could create with deep penetration into spheres not only artistic and philosophical, but also scientific. He had the art of putting rich symbolism into his works more or less explicitly and always did this with impeccable technique.
In the Sistine Chapel, he created scenes of enormous complexity, working in a technique about which he openly said that he did not like it.
450 years after his death, experts are still scratching their heads over deciphering all the symbols that he introduced into this fresco.
This time the curtain has been lifted on the secret message contained in the most famous scene of the Sistine Chapel ceiling painting.
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Even if you have never looked at the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel, at least 1 of the 9 frescoes is familiar to you (especially if you have owned a Nokia feature phone): hands reaching out to each other have become a recognizable symbol throughout the world. The author of this work is Michelangelo Buonarroti, who managed not only to create a real masterpiece, but also to encrypt in it a meaning that changes the understanding of the famous biblical story.
website carefully studied the fresco “The Creation of Adam” and is in a hurry to reveal the artist’s idea, which can deprive one of sleep.
Let's start with the fact that Michelangelo was set up: he was assigned a job that he should not have been able to handle.
Before we begin deciphering one of the most famous frescoes, it is worth getting acquainted with the history of its creation and with the artist himself. Michelangelo Buonarroti is better known as a sculptor, and his statue of David eclipsed all ancient, Greek and Roman sculptures. So cooperation with the Pope (Julius II) began not with the order of frescoes, but with a personal tomb for the head of the Catholic Church. But the artist’s ill-wishers decided to leave Michelangelo without work and informed the pope that building a tomb during his lifetime was a dubious undertaking and could lead to trouble. The task was postponed, but the envious people did not calm down. They pointed out to Julius II the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and hinted that it needed updating, advising that Buonarroti entrust this task. According to the plan, Michelangelo, who had no experience in painting, was supposed to fail the order and leave Rome humiliated. But the artist was not so simple: he himself chose the materials, designed the scaffolding and began to work.
The frescoes on the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel evoke amazement even today, and it is difficult to believe that a person can create such things. The master really had a hard time: after 4 years of painting the ceiling, Michelangelo developed arthritis, scoliosis and an ear infection due to the paint that got on his face. And the church turned out to be a capricious customer: dad forgot to pay for the materials on time, but at the same time he constantly urged the artist and interfered in the process with the demand to correct the colors to make it look richer.
When the work was finished, Julius II was satisfied, and the frescoes with scenes from Genesis made church visitors speechless. The fourth painting, entitled “The Creation of Adam,” received the greatest popularity.
Version No. 1: Michelangelo encrypted the human brain in the fresco
“And God created man in His own image,” says Genesis 1:27. U Michelangelo there was his own interpretation of this phrase, and, according to the popular version, the artist depicted Adam and God in the same fresco placed another important participant in the creation of an intelligent being- human brain. Buonarroti seems to be hinting that a person is capable of looking complete (like Adam in the fresco), but he will not be able to approach the Creator without the ability to think. Or, what sounds even more provocative, everything is created by man, and God is the fruit of his imagination (after all, this ability is the main difference between man and animal). And such a theory already runs counter to religious ideology.
We remind you that the year was 1511 and for speaking about the origin of man from the point of view of science you could lose not only your job, but also your life. The artist was also famous for his interest in anatomy and was involved in autopsies. And not only did Buonarroti confess his love for his hobby, but he also did it on the ceiling of the church in the Vatican.
Since the artist knew the human structure in detail, nothing stopped him from applying anatomy in his works:
- Many scientists have noted the similarity of the outlines of God's cloak with the contours of human brain.
- Side crack Silvio- This is a very deep groove that separates the temporal and parietal lobes.
- The lowest angel, who holds God, with its outlines resembles brain stem.
- Responsible for the endocrine system pituitary, and in the fresco he is depicted as the foot of an angel.
- Right hand God passes through the prefrontal cortex, which is the seat of human intelligence, imagination and creativity.
- Female silhouette under the hand of God shapes supramarginal gyrus.
- The angel, who is at the feet of the Creator, forms the outlines angular gyrus.
- Flowing scarf - vertebral arteries, which have a sinuous shape.
- Angel's Bent Knee - optic chiasm where the fibers of the optic nerves partially intersect.
- Myself Creator is located on the site of the limbic system, which is the emotional center of the brain and the anatomical analogue of the soul.
