Hidden Music in da Vinci's The Last Supper

Posted by Alex in Arts & Crafts, Music, Religion on November 11, 2007 at 2:31 pm



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!


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COMMENT

18 comments to "Hidden Music in da Vinci's The Last Supper"

  1. dotdotdot
    November 11th, 2007 at 3:33 pm

    I have lost a lot of respect for discovery channel after watching that.

    And by the way, that looks nothing like a chalice.

  2. Vonskippy
    November 11th, 2007 at 4:25 pm

    It also contains a map to where Hoffa's body is buried.

  3. Jerry
    November 11th, 2007 at 4:31 pm

    After the big bro-ha-ha over the photos of the "Face On Mars", you'd think they'd begin to understand that:

    People are hardwired to see PATTERNS even where they DON'T exist....

  4. Frank
    November 11th, 2007 at 5:26 pm

    Oh..poor humans...

  5. John J.
    November 11th, 2007 at 5:45 pm

    And if you look at it upside down it is a message from the drug company Merck and it says - Vioxx is a killer.

  6. Carl Huber
    November 11th, 2007 at 6:19 pm

    What if someone just said "hey, those stones on the sidewalk are braille for the word Chupacabra!"
    You wouldn't be calling them horrible things.
    Can't you just appreciate the creativity to notice the coincidence?
    I mean, I agree, that whole thing is a little daVinci Code, but it's harmless, and neat.

  7. natalie
    November 11th, 2007 at 7:27 pm

    Leonardo da Vinci.
    or Leonardo.

    Not da Vinci.

  8. Carl Huber
    November 11th, 2007 at 7:34 pm

    Well since I was referencing the book called "The Da Vinci Code" I think it was pretty accurate :)

    The book title may be inaccurate, but my citation wasn't.

  9. Jess
    November 11th, 2007 at 7:44 pm

    True Jerry.

  10. Kang and Kodos
    November 11th, 2007 at 9:59 pm

    Puny Earthlings! Looking for meaning where there is none! Muhahahaha!

  11. Ali S.
    November 12th, 2007 at 12:38 am

    I always love these things. Patterns and goodies where they may or may not be.

  12. dodgyd55
    November 12th, 2007 at 12:18 pm

    (sigh) yet another "last supper"

  13. ben
    November 12th, 2007 at 1:05 pm

    And if you connect all the freckles on my belly, it spells out "give me a break."

  14. skh.pcola
    November 13th, 2007 at 12:27 am

    Total bullshit. "Since the Apostles were grouped in threes, I consulted the periodic table and discovered that the painting held the secrets to molecular immortality." WTF ever. Total bullshit.

  15. R.Chao
    November 13th, 2007 at 3:45 am

    Is the biggest nosense of the year. Bof.

  16. Monkeyme
    December 6th, 2007 at 4:53 pm

    Sheesh. All these haters don't realize that painters back in the day put a LOT of hidden messages in their paintings. This isn't that far-fetched, sorry to tell you.

  17. Kevinboylan1989
    March 16th, 2009 at 9:16 am

    Thank you monkeyme, as a painter myself there is no limit to the amount of insight that can go into a painting. This isnt a rock formation that looks like an alein or a peice of toast with the face of christ on ebay, this is a well thought out and lengthy compostion by possibly one of the greatest painters and scientist of all time. The cream of the crop of great thinkers. Come on they had music back then, they knew how to write it how much thought does it really take to combined trades? Look him up sometime, he was a scholar, a scientist and a Musician. haha, just accept the fact that your not the only insightful person on planet earth.

  18. James Sellers
    October 23rd, 2009 at 12:06 pm

    Honestly, is it a possibility that it was put in there? Yes. Is it wrong for people to see that it could be real? No.

    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.


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