The Sistine Secrets
Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican
Chapter One
What is the Sistine Chapel?
And let them build for Me a Sanctuary, that I may dwell in their midst.
—Exodus 25:8
On February 18, 1564, the Renaissance died in Rome.
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, known to all simply as Michelangelo, passed away at age eighty-nine in his frugal home in what is today Piazza Venezia. His body was prepared to be entombed inside the nearby Basilica of the Holy Apostles. Today, this church, Santissimi Apostoli, is an amalgam of many times and styles: its top floor is from the nineteenth century, the middle floor is seventeenth-century Baroque, and the ground floor is pure Renaissance from the second half of the fifteenth century. But what is most interesting about Michelangelo's intended burial place is that the original part of the church—the only part that existed in 1564—was designed by none other than Baccio Pontelli, the same man who planned the structure of the Sistine ... read full excerpt from: The Sistine Secrets ebook
