Image: Giovanni Maria Pala
Musician Giovanni Maria Pala claimed to have discovered a hidden musical score for a solemn hymn in da Vinci's masterpiece "The Last Supper." And what's more, the musical notes themselves encode for a Hebrew text, and even a image of the chalice!
The Apostles, represented in groups of three, gave him a hint that the piece should be played in 3/4-time, like much 15th-century music. But it was their hands, always in relation to the breads on the table, that provided the real score -- to be read from right to left, in line with Leonardo's writing.
"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," Pala said.
But there was much more. 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."
Link (with video) - Thanks Stratoblogster!
As a composer and arranger myself, I think the real problem is with the people who say "it's all crap" in some form or another. Even if the musical notes aren't really there, musicians see music everywhere. Are you going to say I'm crap and call BS on me if I write a piece of music based on the shape of a circle? Or say I'm retarded and should be killed because I compose a piece of music based on the patterns I perceive coming from a waterfall? No.
So, a guy saw the bread as music. It's no different from those painters who splatter paint on a canvas, and then step back and go "huh...I just got an idea for a painting using this to start". It's something pre-existing that someone is looking at it from a different vantage point. And it's not the generally accepted vantage point, so everybody claims controversy. No, he's just looking at it from a musical perspective.
And besides, da Vinci played the Lute and put music into all his works. They are all forms of art.