April 17, 1506 - Michelangelo must have known he could be dead before morning if he tried to escape Rome that night. It would be a dark dangerous ride; the sliver of a crescent moon wouldn't rise until four that morning.
If the thieves and cutthroats who preyed on lone riders didn't get him, he still had to outrun the pope's soldiers for 170 miles. The odds of his making it safely back to Florence were long. Yet despite the danger, he had to leave Rome on that cool spring night: to stay invited a fate worse than death.
Michelangelo must have wondered how it all went so wrong. At 31, he was the greatest sculptor since antiquity having already created the Pieta and the David. He came to Rome the year before to sculpt forty statues for the pope's tomb. Yet sculpting was not what Pope Julius wanted from him now.
Instead of working with stone, Julius wanted Michelangelo to do something he had never done before - paint a fresco. And not just any fresco, but one that would cover the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Just after sundown, Michelangelo told his two servants to sell off all of his furniture and follow him to Florence with the money. Then he mounted a horse, slipped through the city gate, and galloped north into the dark along the Via Cassia.
The pope's spies saw Michelangelo leave the city. And his servants probably told Julius where he was going. The pope, known for his terribilita, immediately dispatched a company of soldiers probably with a warning to either come back with Michelangelo or not at all. The race was on.
When Michelangelo told this story years later, he said he arrived safely in the Republic of Florence border town of Poggibonsi at two in the morning. Then shortly thereafter, five of the pope's soldiers followed him into the city.
When they tried to arrest Michelangelo he threatened to have them killed if they laid a hand on him. The soldiers left Poggibonsi empty handed and Michelangelo went home to Florence.
A month later Michelangelo received a letter from a friend in Rome that said the rumor floating around Rome was that he fled because he was afraid to paint the ceiling. He wrote back saying, no, the reason he left was because the pope refused to pay him for the work on the tomb.
I find it hard to believe Michelangelo risked his life with a dangerous midnight ride over a contract dispute. My bet is he fled Rome because he really was afraid to paint the ceiling.
But why was he so afraid?
David Clark's quest to solve the Sistine Chapel mystery started after his wife was killed shortly after they began a piece jigsaw puzzle of the ceiling. After five years of extensive research, he realized the ceiling is a brilliant diversion that hides a secret message by overwhelming the eye. Like a jigsaw puzzle it lures us to pull its hundreds of pieces together to make sense of the whole. However, its meaning cannot be found by putting the pieces together, but through finding the one piece Michelangelo left missing: the piece he lacks in his own life story.
Michelangelo's Puzzle will be told in 90 weekly pieces that when put together will reveal the meaning of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling on November 1, 2012, the 5ooth anniversary of the ceiling's dedication. Follow the story at http://sistinepuzzle.blogspot.com/.
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