FLORENCE, ITALY – Michelangelo carved female sex organs in the Medici Chapels in Florence. The discovery was made by a study of the University of Porto Alegre in Brazil.
The new study focuses on three symbols carved beside the tombs of Giuliano and Lorenzo dei Medici: skulls of cattle and rams, spheres connected by cords, and a shell.
In September 2016 the same team, led by Deivis de Campos, reported that Michelangelo hid coded messages about pagan notions of female sexuality within the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Michelangelo carved pagan symbols of the female sex organs with skulls, shells and spheres; in this way he evoked the shapes of the uterus and Fallopian tubes. According to the Brazilian experts, their shape is a coded reference to that of the uterus and the Fallopian tubes, organs of female reproduction.
The Medici Chapels (Cappelle medicee in Italian) are two structures at the Basilica of San Lorenzo, Florence, Italy, dating from the 16th and 17th centuries, and built as extensions to Brunelleschi’s 15th-century church, with the purpose of celebrating the Medici family, patrons of the church and Grand Dukes of Tuscany. The Sagrestia Nuova, (New Sacristy), was designed by Michelangelo Buonarroti.
The Sagrestia Nuova was intended by Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici and his cousin Pope Leo X as a mausoleum or mortuary chapel for members of the Medici family.
It balances Brunelleschi’s Sagrestia Vecchia, the Old Sacristy nestled between the left transept of San Lorenzo, with which it consciously competes, and shares its format of a cubical space surmounted by a dome, of gray pietra serena and whitewashed walls.
It was the first essay in architecture (1521–24) of Michelangelo, who also designed its monuments dedicated to certain members of the Medici family, with sculptural figures of the four times of day that were destined to influence sculptural figures reclining on architraves for many generations to come.
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