Roy Doliner

even years ago Roy Doliner noticed something wasn't right with the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling. He had been working as a tour guide for three years. "I was following the party line," Doliner says, "just repeating whatever the official Vatican guidebooks said." What got him thinking was the Jeremiah Parchment, an hardly visible piece of paper painted to the left of the prophet's right knee. "You can't even see it from the floor, 65 feet below. The guidebooks all explained that the parchment contained the Greek letters alpha and omega," says Doliner. "But when you look closely, as I did, you can clearly see that the letters spell out alef, followed by the Hebrew letter ayin. And the handwriting is definitely Michelangelo's, because nobody else ever made it up there."

From that point on Doliner — whose background is in Talmud studies and art history, and is also a certified interpreter for the hearing-impaired — began probing Michelangelo's hidden Sistine messages and making his controversial findings public. Rabbi Benjamin Blech, an internationally recognized scholar on Judaism, got in touch with him and recommended the two of them collaborate on a book. Three years later Harper Collins published "The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican." Marc Di Martino chatted with Roy Doliner in Rome. These are excepts from their conversation.

Pope Julius II: Il papa terribile.

Your book presents a Judaic interpretation of the Sistine Chapel, but is it possible that it's in the eye of the beholder?

Well, there is documentation for a lot of it, and there is also a lot of missing documentation that Michelangelo intentionally burned. So, some of the things in the book are evident and irrefutable. Take the presence of the two Jews in heaven. Look at the work and the scroll with the Hebrew word "alef" and the letter "ayin" — it's right there. Also, there's not a single Christian figure out of more than 300 figures on the ceiling… there’s nothing Christian up there.

Some might say that that's the Old Testament, right?

Well, you could say that, but that’s not what the pope [Julius II] ordered.

What did he order?

The pope ordered Jesus and the apostles. The center was supposed to duplicate a geometric pattern that had been found in recent excavations of pagan imperial palaces. The middle was going to be ... the papal tiara, the keys and the stemma of the papal shield of the della Rovere family, to show that they controlled the world. That's exactly what Michelangelo did not paint.

So why did he let it go?

Well, the pope was called "il papa terribile," he had a horrible temper. He did away with thousands of people, rode a horse with a sword strapped a sword to his side, and shot cannons through Perugia and all of central Italy. But he had a weakness: good art. After finally getting a sneak peek at what Michelangelo did on the ceiling, he let it stay. He and Michelangelo also faced the fact [that when Michelangelo turned to the ceiling], there was a good chance the three-dimensional marble mausoleum that Pope Julius had designed for himself for the center of the new St. Peter's Cathedral [would go by the wayside.]

So Michelangelo made the ceiling look like a three-dimensional painted version of the tomb. At the top, over the door, he put the pope. The pope could stand at the alter, look across the Sistine Chapel, and see himself hovering over the main door to the room, at the top of the structure that looked like his personal tomb.

Ray Doliner

So he played to the pope's ego, basically.

Absolutely.

Beyond the hidden Jewish themes in the ceiling, your book highlights the explicit homosexual content in the Last Judgment. How does this all tie together in a unified vision?

Obviously it's not what the pope ordered. So, if you have scholars who are saying that Michelangelo did every single thing that the pope and all the theologians in the Vatican told him to, that would mean they said, "Have a bunch of naked boys making out in heaven!" Something tells me this wasn't what they ordered.

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