The Last Supper DJ?
We've had a couple of items about the Last Supper, the iconic Leonardo Da Vinci painting, in the past few months. First it was the researcher who claimed that superimposing a reversed image on top of the original yielded some hints about - well - something. Maybe a Holy Grail, maybe a Holy Baby or maybe some Knights Templar. Or something.
Then came the news that amateurs and experts alike could very a super high resolution image of the original painting. The idea there is to improve access to the painting for research and to save wear and tear on a very fragile work of art.
Earlier, we also had a story about a famous chapel in Britain (featured prominently in The Da Vinci Code) and the efforts of a father and son team to decipher the musical code they believed they had found in the decorative stonework. The Rosslyn Motet debuted in May of this year.
Well, someone is now claiming to have deciphered music in the placement of the bread and hands in the painting of The Last Supper.
"It sounds like a requiem," Giovanni Maria Pala said. "It's like a soundtrack that emphasizes the passion of Jesus."
Painted from 1494 to 1498 in Milan's Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, the "Last Supper" vividly depicts a key moment in the Gospel narrative: Jesus' last meal with the 12 Apostles before his arrest and crucifixion, and the shock of Christ's followers as they learn that one of them is about to betray him.
Pala, a 45-year-old musician who lives near the southern Italian city of Lecce, began studying Leonardo's painting in 2003, after hearing on a news program that researchers believed the artist and inventor had hidden a musical composition in the work.
"Afterward, I didn't hear anything more about it," he said in an interview with The Associated Press. "As a musician, I wanted to dig deeper."
In a book released Friday in Italy, Pala explains how he took elements of the painting that have symbolic value in Christian theology and interpreted them as musical clues.
Pala first saw that by drawing the five lines of a musical staff across the painting, the loaves of bread on the table as well as the hands of Jesus and the Apostles could each represent a musical note.
This fit the relation in Christian symbolism between the bread, representing the body of Christ, and the hands, which are used to bless the food, he said. But the notes made no sense musically until Pala realized that the score had to be read from right to left, following Leonardo's particular writing style.
In his book - "La Musica Celata" ("The Hidden Music") - Pala also describes how he found what he says are other clues in the painting that reveal the slow rhythm of the composition and the duration of each note.
The result is a 40-second "hymn to God" that Pala said sounds best on a pipe organ, the instrument most commonly used in Leonardo's time for spiritual music.
Unfortunately, Pala's website does not appear to have a sample of the music. Or maybe it does and we can't find it. We here at Blue Crab Boulevard, not to be outdone, decided to decipher the double-reverse image of The Last Supper, play the resultant music on the Crabitat's Wurlitzer (the small one) then play the recording backward.
It said, "Paul is dead." We're not sure what that means.
Humor, Weird Stuff, World news | Gaius Friday, 9 November , 2007
By Jeff Nisbet, Monday, 12 November , 2007 @ 5:32 pm
Relative to the Rosslyn Motet story, read the article that begins on the home page of my website, at http://www.mythomorph.com
All Best,
Jeff Nisbet