The Enigma: Occult, Symbols, and Codes

Michelangelo Buonarroti transformed the earthly into the cosmic, and the finite into the infinite, extracting the soul from marble and uniting men and gods.

The writer Thor Jurodovich Kostich reveals to us, with unprecedented depth, all the details of life between torment and ecstasy.

This book takes us into the life of the divine Michelangelo through the arcane keys and the unfathomable mysteries that furrow the folds of La Pietà, in the disturbing gaze of Moses, in the perfect hand of David, in the works of the greatest artist of history.

Thor Jurodovich, a writer specializing in the anthropology of religions, offers us an exciting investigation into the spirit of genius among geniuses.

It is not easy to delve into the soul, the work, and the teaching of a genius of the Renaissance, since precisely that era that we Europeans venerate for its “human” progress (humanism) plunges us with mysterious lights and reflections into brilliant lives.

The sculptor was insatiable when it came to the perfection of his work. He spent months in Carrara, choosing the marble blocks but the secret of his art lay precisely in the ability to find a soul in stones, an afterlife in the matter, and a transcendence in death. He saw the mountains as sculptural matter and imagined the hills turned into statues. That is why, in his youth, he dared to dispute a block of marble with Leonardo da Vinci.

Without a doubt, he had discovered that, inside, a David was hiding.

Nearing ninety years of age, Michelangelo was still riding among the stone blocks of the Vatican, watching the factory go up. Among the statues, he felt invited to be part of a Sacred History that was revealed to him in the marble blocks.

When he walked the streets of Rome he often happened to meet ancient and mysterious characters whom, no doubt by mistake, he had believed dead.

But his hand was failing, to the point that he couldn’t draw the sketches.

The hand no longer serves me – he commented to his nephew- but from now on I will have others write and I will sign. Luckily, many years before, he had already sculpted his masterpiece, the only one he signed: the fascinating Pietà.

With an unusual and curious perspective, the author searches ancient Neoplatonic thought for the precedents of the sculptures and paintings of the Renaissance genius and, between notes and letters, studies, and magnificent literary resources, it reveals the artist’s interesting connections with the Kabbalah and Jewish wisdom, which Michelangelo discovered in fifteenth-century Florence, thanks to Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, Marsilio Ficino, and the humanist Angelo Poliziano, who was also his teacher.