Posted on 07/26/2007 7:03:19 AM PDT by NYer
An Italian IT expert claims to have found a secret image of the Virgin Mary and a Knight Templar inside Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece The Last Supper.
Pesci Slavisa said the image can only be seen in a certain light and that he had to use his computer skills to reveal it.
“I noticed a strange effect, like a shadow, when I was looking through a magazine with a reproduction of The Last Supper,” the 36-year-old explained.
“So I scanned the painting and printed it onto a transparent sheet, which I then laid over the original image.
“The result is a new painting with other figures”.
The news may revive the debate about the painting’s alleged hidden meanings, which was stirred up by Dan Brown’s bestselling thriller The Da Vinci Code.
In The Da Vinci Code, Brown controversially suggested, among other things, that the figure closest to Jesus in the painting was not St John but Mary Magdalene.
The book argues Mary Magdalene was misrepresented in male-dominated Christian history because she allegedly led the Apostles and started Jesus’s blood line: supposedly the real ‘Holy Grail’ (in French, ’sang real’ or royal blood).
The ‘truth’ about the Holy Grail is guarded by the Priory of Sion, which created the Knights Templar, according to the book.
Slavisa, however, insisted that he was not trying to prove any theories about the artwork.
“I’m not an art critic,” he said. “Other people will give explanations of the image. I limit myself to presenting what I noticed by chance, which can be verified very simply.
“I have not even read The Da Vinci Code, I’ve only seen the film, and I’m not even a Leonardo enthusiast.
“Indeed, I was not going to make my findings public at first”.
Milan Culture Councillor and renowned art critic Vittorio Sgarbi dismissed Slavisa’s claims as “pure invention”.
“Although I have not followed this matter, I think it is totally without foundation,” he said.
“The iconography of The Last Supper is the most classical and evangelical. It’s impossible that the painting contains different people from the ones that can be seen.
“Only someone as ignorant as a goat could introduce elements that are not absolutely orthodox into The Last Supper.
“If someone sees something by looking at it through a mirror then that is their point of view, but it is nothing to do with what Leonardo wanted or thought”.
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The Saint Bernard's going for the inside straight. |
I always laugh at the same thing: These guys act as though da Vinci took a snapshot of the event, and there were ghosts in the negatives.
Maybe I’m missing something. We’re discussing a figure in a DaVinci painting of Jesus and his 12 apostles at the last supper. You make the following statement...
“It’s St. John (as in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John).”
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are the writers of the 4 Gospels, all of which, I understand, were written beginning 80-100 AD by people that were not of the original 12.
I may be worng about that fact but not about you linking the apostle in the painting with one of the 4 authors of the gospels.
Look close and you can see Mr. Iscariot.
>>>“So I scanned the painting and printed it onto a transparent sheet, which I then laid over the original image.
I don't understand why this genius had to scan the image.
Scanning magazine images, if done improperly, will result in bleed through from whatever is on the back of the page you're scanning. It didn't say how he scanned it, or whether or not he used black paper behind the scanned page. Which is a common method of preventing bleed through.
Don’t laugh too hard. Darth Vader is forever enshrined in what’s called a “grotesque” at the National Cathedral. Very strange.
http://www.cathedral.org/cathedral/discover/darth.shtml
The mythology that had grown up around these women were srubbed away but the examples of the women themselves were not scrubbed away. There's a big difference. I can't tell how often it is noted in evangelical churches that the first people that Jesus appeared to after his resurrection were women.
Stories like that of St. Margaret of Antioch being swallowed by a dragon (or serpent) and causing it to blow up because she held a cross were no longer taught for very good reasons.
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