Doctors claim they’ve cracked ‘Michelangelo code’
Completed nearly 500 years ago, the brightly coloured frescoes painted on the Vatican’s famous sanctuary are considered some of the world’s greatest works of art. They depict Biblical scenes such as the Creation of Adam, in which God reaches out to touch Adam’s finger.
But Gilson Barreto and Marcelo de Oliveira believe Michelangelo also scattered his detailed knowledge of internal anatomy across 34 of the ceiling’s 38 panels. The way they see it, a tree trunk is not just a tree trunk, but also a bronchial tube. And a green bag in one scene is really a human heart.
The key to finding the numerous organs, bones and other human insides is to first crack a “code” they believe was left behind by the Florentine artist. Essentially, it is a set of sometimes subtle, sometimes overt clues, like the way a figure is pointing. “Why wasn’t this ever seen before? First, because very few people have the sufficient anatomical knowledge to see these pieces like this. I do because that’s my profession,” said Dr Barreto, a surgeon in the Brazilian city of Campinas.
Dr Barreto and his friend Dr Oliveira are not the first physicians to see depictions of human organs in the Sistine Chapel. Fifteen years ago, US doctor Frank Meshberger pointed out the figure of God and his surrounding angels in the Creation of Adam panel resembled a cross-section of the human brain.
Packing up his desk as he prepared to move houses, Dr Barreto came across Dr Meshberger’s theory.
“I said to myself, ‘If there’s a brain, he surely didn’t just paint a brain. There have to be others’,” Dr Barreto said.
Thumbing through books and pictures of the chapel all night, Dr Barreto said he found five or six other anatomical depictions. He presented his findings to Dr Oliveira the next day and the two probed further for three months.
The project culminated with their book The Secret Art of Michelangelo, which was published in Brazil last year.
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