In the central part of the Last Judgement fresco, Michelangelo painted St. Bartholomew holding his skin. This a very relevant allegory for our alchemical Mumia.
In the central part of that deluge of flesh and muscle, which is Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, we are chiefly caught by a detail: St. Bartholomew holding his skin. The iconography of the skin is not widely used both in painting and in alchemical and philosophical symbolism. Perhaps because, as a gruesome detail, it has often been relegated to the things of the martyrs. We know that Michelangelo defined himself as a penitent devoured by the so-called tortures of the flesh, and the Sistine Chapel, at least in theory, has always been considered by Vatican liturgists the place where the Holy Spirit acts. And they are not that wrong. This bizarre artistic antique is too important, both from the alchemic point of view and the point of view of Philosophy hidden in paintings. In fact, the only alchemical flesh that should interest us is unequivocally the skin of St. Bartholomew, which the painter put on his face.
Michelangelo Buonarroti started to paint the Last Judgement in the area behind the altar of the Cappella Sistina in 1536. He was 60 years old and would have completed his work only six years later. When the fresco was open for the public to see, on 25 December 1541, what they perceived was a huge oeuvre, 17 meters high for 13 wide, teeming with hundreds of nude figures.
But calling them generically figures doesn’t exactly represent what caught the first visitors’ sight since these figures actually are hundreds of athletic muscle-bound male characters, in which even old St. Peter seems a muscular athlete with a white beard and the rare women are beefy young men with out of place added breasts. Of course, we can not be amazed and surprised by all this, that’s what Michelangelo had always been about, since the beginning of his career. But all that flesh was not iconography nonsense, in fact, the Judgement day is seen as the flesh resurrection day, which traditionally (and alchemically) should be instead a divine spiritual substance and not a pulpy raw matter.
The artists of the Renaissance period, and above all the great ones like Michelangelo, demanded a real contract between them and those who commissioned the work, even if it was the Pope. These sheets mentioned the smallest details and also the limits of freedom of creative expression. So, for example, they wrote that the painter X undertook to paint a certain number of figures, between large and small, and a certain number of background landscapes with X number of trees, rivers, and palaces. The art of painting at that time was judged by the technical ability of the artisan and by the difficulty, always technical, of the work commissioned. Of course, the artist/artisan knew that those figures had to convey and evoke the faith of the prevailing religion. But we must not think that the Pope’s court was any different in tastes from other Italian Renaissance courts: the Popes at the time were of exclusive aristocratic birth, and they were educated from childhood to play and entertain themselves with erudition. Pope Clement VII’s biography also respected these rules, as he was the son of Giuliano de ‘Medici, even if only a natural son.
In 1533 Michelangelo was already working in Florence on various projects for Pope Clement VII in San Lorenzo. In September of that year, the artist went to San Miniato al Tedesco to meet the Pope on his way to France, and it seems that on that occasion the pontiff expressed the desire to have him fresco the wall behind the altar of the Sistine Chapel with a monumental Last Judgment, a theme that would have worthily concluded the biblical, evangelical and apostle stories of the Chapel. Pope Clement’s desire was in all probability due to the desire to link his name to the enterprise of the Sistine Chapel, as his major predecessors had done.
But who chose St. Bartholomew as the central figure around which to unravel the story? In all likelihood, it was Michelangelo himself. Or at least, a very important part of him, to an extent that he came to identify with this figure so that he painted his face on those poor human remains.
Bartholomew’s name first appears in the list of the twelve sent by Christ to preach and, again, in the Acts of the Apostles, where he is listed together with the other apostles after the resurrection of Christ. From this moment only legends tell us of his missionary life in various regions of the Middle East including Mesopotamia. According to some, perhaps he went as far as India. Even his death, according to some sources, is entrusted to the tradition that wants him killed, and skinned, by the king of the Medes in the region of Syria. On the left is a statue in Duomo di Milano portraying a skinned St. Bartholomew. Marco D’Agrate, the artist who sculpted it in 1562 – only two decades after Michelangelo’s – neglected the most important part: the skin.
The context in which Michelangelo inserted the symbol of the skin is the Last Judgment. In Italian, it is known as Giudizio Universale or universal judgment. The name was given perhaps to justify the very essence of Catholicism, whose meaning in Latin is precisely “universal”.
One of the oldest iconographic examples of Giudizio Universale in Italy can be found in the Byzantine-Venetian mosaic behind the altar of the basilica of Santa Maria Assunta on the island of Torcello, in the Venetian lagoon.
At the beginning of the fourteenth century on the mainland, in Padua, the banker Enrico Scrovegni had Giotto paint a Giudizio Universale to decorate the family chapel, indeed the Scrovegni Chapel. In both pieces of art, we do not notice St. Bartholomew offering his skin. So we are sure that he was not a typical iconography of the main subject. Even better, this motiv is extremely rare in Renaissance paintings, and it is paradoxical to find this elusive symbol in the work of an artist, Michelangelo Buonarroti, in whose art it is really so little that can help us to define him as a hermetic artist.
Unlike painters such as Durer, Bosch, Giovanni Bellini, Parmigianino, Guercino, Perugino, and Mantegna who used to scatter hermetic bits over their works, in Michelangelo this comes with an extreme rarity. Did Michelangelo know the meaning of the profound and esoteric symbolism? Did he know the relevance of skin allegory and how the whole hermeticism, along with Alchemy, was based on it? Besides being remorseful Michelangelo was also a great admirer of Dante, he is said to know by heart whole passages of the Divine Comedy. And surely he also realized the esoteric and hermetic implications involved in Dante’s work.
In Florence, in the first half of the sixteenth century, there was no longer just Dante, Francesco da Barberino, and Petrarca. Marsilio Ficino had already exhausted his earthly adventure and had already translated works from Greek philosophers, but above all, Ficino had already met Gemistos Pletho, the last secret erudite of the dead school of Athens. Therefore Florence had already come into contact with the Neoplatonists, perhaps there was no Bessarion, like in Venice, but the first Neoplatonic academies were beginning to emerge and even bore the name of these late pagan philosophers.
From a religious point of view, the Last Judgment is a process. An obligatory passage to which the soul of the believer undergoes the entrance to the afterlife. Indeed, a real sorting place for souls, probably from here the crowding, towards the goal that was decided by the actions performed in life. Greek philosophy, on the other hand, says something different: a Homeric scene describes a process when guilt and law were weighed on the scales whose oscillations had to be interpreted. But not from a priest who performs a ritual, but from an oracle. As a matter of fact, the oracle thus has to decide the fate of the two parties, pronouncing itself on a dispute conducted as a sacred ordeal, and his judgment was not a simple punishment but sanctioned destiny. It is the same ritual scheme preserved in the game of the chessboard that Homer still remembers in the Odyssey. But this would lead us into a field of knowledge too far from the context we are analyzing. Therefore, a sacred ordeal. And to perpetuate it, we need a “field of action”, and this place is the skin that envelops and surrounds us. A spiritual part, but still anchored to our body.
Here we are only hinting, only touching, the ancient Philosophy and barely mentioning the triad Apollo-Hecate-Hermes, where Hecate is the ineffable deity of the Aura, powerful beyond measure because feared even by Zeus. Her famous spinning top was the instrument with which she was evoked by oracles.
Hecate is the indispensable presence and vehicle between I one and II two. She actually is number three III in the Tetraktys formula, the only mathematical formula that can be read visually, without too much abstraction. Ancient myths have her represent the Aura that surrounds all bodies, and the simplest, as well as the clearest symbol, cannot but be a skin that envelops our body.
Can we in this case use a term so dear to the Theosophists as “subtle body”? Each cultural era has defined this skin in different terms, for example, the subtle body was described by Iamblichus as the vehicle of the soul (ochêma tês psuchês), and it is through this vehicle that the soul animates the physical body and through which it receives the presence of the gods. It is through the ochêma that the soul enters embodied life, and it is through this same ochêma that the soul receives the gods and becomes divine.
Bartholomew is portrayed with a knife in his hand and it seems as if he has skinned himself. In the meanwhile, he is looking at his neighbor, St. Lawrence on the gridiron. Actually defining a grill that is rather a ladder is a stretch. In fact here St. Lawrence is holding his gridiron like the farmers who go to pick cherries and take their ladders, slipped over their shoulders. But this cannot be a real ladder, because it has six steps, like any convenient esoteric stairs.
When it comes to Arcana, alchemists are luckier as they can, to a certain extent, speak more freely of their operations, but through their symbolism. We have already encountered the Skin concept in Blaise de Vigenère. In his Traité du Feu et du Sel, Treatise on Fire and Salt, the French diplomat speaks of sacrifices on minerals and how the extracted skin can be considered a form of light. And how this one becomes the only true alchemical body in the middle of all that raw matter/Materia Tertia. Because the symbolic skin of our body is the ineffable organ qualified to interact with light, in the same way, Secret Fire is extracted out of whichever body qualified to interact with light, and also with another Secret Fire/Mercurius/Spirit of Life. Mercurius Duplicatus and/or the interactions between our Spirit of Life and light are all model roles for our alchemical skin. Therefore the skin is synonymous with standing for the Spirit of Life as well as being synonymous with “Mumia” or mummy. And in the same way, Mumia/mummy and skin are allegories for Mercurius.
Both Paracelsus and Philalethes made use of the term “Mumia”. Paracelsus called it also “Evestrum” in “Liber Apocalypseos Hermetis, de Supremo Mundi Secreto” or book of the hermetic revelations on the ultimate secret of the world (retaken by B.Figulus in Pandora 1608). He also writes a little treatise entitled “De vis magnetica mumiae in homine” in which Mumia-Skin has the attribute of magnetic because its essential fire, unlike the common fire, operates exclusively by means of its essences and virtues. Ostanes would say that “a nature delights in another nature”.
Archarion in his Von Wahrer Alchemie, Freiburg 1983 retook Philalethes: “It is the Light of Life, Mumia Vitalis, the Calidum Nativum (native warm), the radical humidum, Mercurius Vitae (Mercurius of Life), Mercurius of a spiritual and heavenly pure essence, which ordinary men called Heaven, which appears to their eyes consisting of blue light, air, and a magnetic salt. This salt is the fermenting agent, flavoring, balsamic, opening, and altering, in fact into it, its nice mirror, there is a magnetic air light, the concentrated breath of life that gives taste and smell, the celestial fire, the blue agent, the fiery nature, the celestial matter that makes visible the invisible, spiritual the material and manifests the hidden”.
The last sentence brings us to an alchemical axiom, not hermetic though, that’s to say we have to make another pulpy flesh to embody this spiritual light. Mummies and skins seem here to have close resemblances with the esoteric etheric bodies, but Alchemy is all about new embodiments for ancient Souls and moreover the most ancient of all, namely our Spirit of Life/Mumia/Skin (6).
And here the St. Lawrence stairs come in handy: standing either for the densities of Mercurius, or Scala Transmutationibus (stairs of transmutations), or the six steps in the last cooking. The first matter then becomes matter first or Materia Prima. The resurrection of the flesh, or better the divine ethereal flesh, is the day we will remain only with the noblest part of ourselves, more precisely with the one we will be able to extract. Although alchemists commonly reserve this treatment to metals, that’s to say destroying a metal to take out the noblest part, or Secret Fire/Mercurius/Spirit of Life. However we then need a new flesh, or body, to host it.
On a ladder of densities this Secret Fire/Mercurius will make denser, or richer, the same Mercurius, once duplicated, till becoming a metallic Perfect Sulfur/Soul/Christ through sublimation and/or fixation on the cross of St. John the Baptist. The whole action seems to start from St. Peter, the old white-bearded man just above St. Bartholomew, and on the left of Christ. The first of the evangelists, or the Holy Stone Saint, looks very similar to our Saturn, the extracting and dissolving agent, or Mercurius. In fact, St. Peter is handing two keys to his Christ: one gold and one silver. Just as the two secret keys mentioned by Dante in Divine Comedy and very much resembling the two hermetic keys sealed in gold and silver, that’s to say the moon tree and sun tree.
- see also Blaise de Vigenère & Salt Sacrifice, Victim of Fire ; Botticelli, Venus Birth & the Primaterialistic Subject;
- see also Eros, Psyche & a new Alchemical Body;
- See also Wenceslaw Lavinius and the Sky and Earth Properties and Stoll, the Lacinius Translator on Male and Female Elements ;
- see also Atalanta Fugiens & Mercurius Duplicatus;
- see also Thesaurus Hermeticum & the Dry Pythagorean River;
- See also Holbein Dead Christ Builds his Grave ;