Is Da Vinci’s Last Supper “a Soundtrack that Emphasises the Passion of Jesus”?
November 14th, 2007 by Menachem Wecker
(Image) Discovery Channel.
In a story that broke a few days ago, computer technician Giovanni Maria Pala claims Jesus’ and the Apostles’ hands and the loaves of bread in Da Vinci’s Last Supper each represent a note in a 40-second composition. The Telegraph quotes Alessandro Vezzosi, of Tuscany’s Leonardo museum, who said it’s “plausible,” but “There’s always a risk of seeing something that is not there, but it’s certain that the spaces [in the painting] are divided harmonically … Where you have harmonic proportions, you can find music.”
The Discovery Channel, which plays up the Da Vinci Code angle, adds a few important quotes from Pala:
“This is not another spin-off of Dan Brown’s novel. It’s real … I’ve always been intrigued by the possibility of finding a (piece of) music in the Last Supper, but I would have never imagined to find myself decoding a secret message by Leonardo.”
“I was first struck by the tablecloth, which features horizontal lines but also vertical lines in correspondence with the pieces of bread. This made me think immediately of music notes on a pentagram. I tried to play the notes, but it did not work. Looking at single details wasn’t the correct approach.”
“I marked the pieces of bread on the table and the Apostle’s hands as music notes. Then I drew a pentagram over the scene between the tablecloth and Jesus’ face. I couldn’t believe my ears when I played the music. It sounded really solemn, almost like a requiem.”
But then things start getting really strange.
DC continues:
Pala noticed that the notes, in their position, produced strange symbols — similar to ancient cuneiform script — when united to each other by lines.
Examined by Father Luigi Orlando, a biblical scholar at the Antonianum Pontifical University in Rome, the cuneiform writing turned out to be a sentence written in ancient Hebrew: “bo nezer usbi,” which means “with Him consecration and glory.”
Seeing the Chalice
“At this point I was totally into this puzzle,” Pala said. “I placed the nine letters of the ancient Hebrew text one on top of the other, following an ascending path, which is the direction of the hands of the first six Apostles. The result was a strange image.”
He noticed that on the table, to the right, Leonardo painted a piece of bread split in half.
“I thought of this as a hint to duplicate that image,” Pala said. The resulting image — nine letters stacked on top of each other and duplicated — was the chalice.
When Pala rotated the image of the chalice further, he found a motif very similar to the decorations in Santa Maria delle Grazie, the church where Leonardo painted “The Last Supper” in 1497.
“I think there are too many things fitting together, and cannot just be coincidences,” Pala said.
His discovery is sure to raise controversy.
Controversy eh? No wonder the Inquirer titles its piece “Mad geezer sees music in painting.” With the gem, “Obviously frustrated that he joined the queue too late to secure an Iphone, Giovanni Maria Pala claims that the painting contains a super-secret, 40 second composition … Quite why the BBC considers this rubbish to be worthy of publication remains a mystery. The Inq’s musical consultant, Julian Lloyd-Tigger, comments: ‘It’s not entirely clear what this bloke is smoking, but I’d like to try some.’”