We all know them, but at the same time we don’t. The world’s most famous works of art are an inexhaustible wellspring of irresistibly compelling mysteries. Leonardo da Vinci was not only a well-educated genius, he was also a lover of puzzles. He is said to have incorporated several of them in his most recognisable paintings, the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper. His contemporary Michelangelo Bonarotti also liked to play with his works, and both men opened the door wide to plausible, but also very strange, explanations of what they were trying to communicate to the world, in plain sight, but only visible to a select few. One of the secrets saw the light of day last year, almost 500 years after it was supposedly written.
No matter how many secrets they reveal, there is always another one. The Mona Lisa, said to be the most famous painting in the world, just won’t let you get close. Leonardo da Vinci, on the other hand, always had it with him, from the day he started painting it in 1503 or 1504 until his death in 1519. He carried it with him, rolled up and safely tucked away in a sleeve, wherever his travels took him, so that he could constantly replenish it.
After his death, it was inherited by his apprentice Gian Giacomo Caprotti, better known by his nickname Salai, along with many of his other paintings and half of his vineyard. The Mona Lisa passed from his estate into French hands and, after first hanging in the Palace of Versailles near Paris, has long since made its home in the Louvre, where it is relentlessly gazed at by throngs of tourists, but also by the eyes of experts.
To understand it, it has been explored in every modern way that can penetrate it without damaging it, yet last year Silvano Vinceti claimed to have discovered something that no one has ever seen before: the eyes of the Mona Lisa are said to reveal more than the human eye has ever seen before.
Well, he didn’t make the discovery either, finding the L and V in the right pupil of the Mona Lisa only when he placed a powerful magnifying glass over the image. The letters are probably the initials of Leonardo da Vinci, who started painting the Mona Lisa in Florence and finished it in France.
In 1516, aged 63, he was invited there by King Francis I (1515-1547). The French king is said to have regularly visited his genial guest, who brought only a few personal belongings and three paintings to his new home, and of course did not part with Salaio.
Those who believe Leonardo was homosexual say that Salai was his lover. This is not a problem, the problem only arises when they start to interpret the face of the Mona Lisa. Some believe that Leonardo depicted Salai in it, others wonder whether he might not have drawn himself, and still others believe that the portrait is an accurate representation of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a wealthy merchant from Tuscany.
To solve the mystery, they have been digging through the soil where Lisa Gherardini is believed to have been for almost five years to find her remains. If they could get their hands on her bones and skull, they could recreate her image and find out whether or not she looks anything like the one in the picture. They would like to dig up Leonardo and do the same, but the French authorities won’t let them.
Silvano Vinceti did not need any permission to take a closer look at Mona Lisa’s left pupil. He found the letters there too, but this time he wasn’t sure which one. It seemed to him to be a C and an E, although the E could also be a B or maybe even an S like Salai.
Many experts find his discovery far-fetched. The painting is almost 500 years old, they say, and the cracks must have appeared. There are no letters and no numbers, they insist, but Vinceti, on the other hand, is convinced that Leonardo left a love message in the left pupil for whoever is in the painting.
Many believe that it is Lisa Gherardini, but they also agree that she is unusually androgynous. Silvano Vincenti again offers his explanation: it is because it is both male and female. Leonardo is said to have depicted both Lisa and Salai in it. The latter was the model for many of his portraits, including Saint John the Baptist, Saint Anne and an erotic drawing of a young man with an erection.
Salai is said to have contributed the nose, forehead and smile to the Mona Lisa, as they are very similar to those in other paintings he has posed for, and Lisa Gherardini is said to have been Leonardo’s first model, so the print is essentially feminine in shape.
The secret of number 72
No more problems with Mona Lisa, letters and numbers? No. The arch on the bridge, barely visible in the background, is also believed to have hidden its secret for almost 500 years. It is said to bear the number 72, although it could also be an L and the number 2.
Although most experts believe that the landscape painted in the background is imaginary, Carla Glori believes it is real. The three-arched bridge is said to have once stood in the village of Bobbio in Piacenza, northern Italy, and the number 72 is said to commemorate the year 1472, when the Trebbia River crossed its banks and destroyed the bridge. The number 72 is thus another of Leonardo’s riddles – the true name of the bridge will be revealed to whoever solves it.
But these are just the latest secrets from the intangible world of the famous Mona Lisa. Before that, experts were scratching their heads wondering how Leonardo managed to paint her the way he did. They simply did not understand how he managed to create that blurred look and blur the sharp edges.
Only X-ray imaging showed that he had applied 40 layers of extremely thin glaze to the Mona Lisa. It is also the reason why the Mona Lisa has that mysterious smile that centuries have not been able to unravel. Looking straight into her eyes, the viewer does not smile; looking at her from the side, a gentle smile adorns her face.
But it was still not clear to the experts how he did it. As X-rays were used to decipher the structure of the glaze and its thickness, the veils on the Mona Lisa became fewer and fewer. Each layer of the glaze is only two micrometres thick, 50 times thinner than a human hair. When they looked at some other portraits, they found that on lighter areas of the skin the glaze is very thin, but on darker areas there are more layers and the glaze can be as much as 55 micrometres thick. They also observed grains of black and red pigment in the glaze, which probably added to the blurred effect of the image, but they were unable to examine them more closely with X-rays, and of course they must not be allowed to touch the image.
The problem with the glaze was that one layer took several months to dry. To paint the Mona Lisa as it is, Leonardo had to apply layers of varnish over years, so it is not surprising that he painted it for many years and never parted with it. To get the shade of dark colour he wanted, he had to observe exactly how thick the glaze was, because the thicker it was, the darker the shade.
He must have applied the glaze with his finger, because there are no visible brush marks, but despite this, or perhaps because of it, the colour tones shift from lighter to darker so discreetly that the transition is barely noticeable.
Tourists can see how masterfully he mastered this complex technique at the Louvre, even though the Mona Lisa was not hung there between 1911 and 1913. In August 1911, it was stolen by an Italian museum employee to return it to Leonardo’s native country. The Italians had to return it, but only came to terms with the loss two years later, when the famous painting was seen in exhibitions all over Italy.
She was attacked twice in 1956, which is why she is now hidden under bullet-proof glass, and why she was fine, for example, when a Russian woman, furious at not having been granted citizenship, threw a teacup at her.
The end of the world in 4006
As mysterious as the Mona Lisa, Leonardo’s version of the Last Supper is equally mysterious. Leonardo began painting it on the wall of the church and convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in 1495 and finished it three years later.
Although it is on the wall, the Last Supper is not a fresco, but a painting. If he had decided to make a mural, he would have had to work much faster than he was doing now, painting on the wall, and the colours would not have been what he wanted them to be.
When he finished the Last Supper, it must have been what he imagined it would be. It showed Jesus and the 12 apostles moments after Jesus announced that one of them would betray Him. But its beauty did not last long. Painted on the wall, it deteriorated so quickly that only 50 years after it was painted, it was a shadow of its former self.
They tried to restore it, but that only damaged it more, and the Allied bombs during the Second World War also did their part. They fell in its surroundings and caused it to crack.
Part of the painting literally disappeared in 1652, when the monastery needed a new door and came up with the idea of breaking through the very wall that depicted the Last Supper. So Jesus sacrificed his feet for the new door.
The Last Supper was only really restored five centuries after it was painted, between 1978 and 1999, but by then it was in such a poor state that few of Leonardo’s original colours are visible today. But that does not stop those searching for secret symbols from seeing what it might contain and what it probably does not.
Vatican researcher Sabrina Sforza Galitzia, for example, found that Leonardo predicted the end of the world in the painting: according to his predictions, Judgement Day would come on 1 November 4006. The window above Jesus’ head is said to contain symbols that say that the flood will begin on 21 March 4006 and last until 1 November of the same year. But according to Leonardo, this will not be the end of humanity, but its new beginning.
“All around you will see venerable trees uprooted and cut down by ferocious winds … The rising rivers will flood and submerge the vast plains and their inhabitants,” wrote the man who mysteriously disappeared in 1476 to an unknown destination and reappeared in Florence two years later.
Leonardo’s Requiem
By then, his interest had already gone far beyond painting. Among other things, he was also a good musician. He played the lyre, made his own instruments and wrote musical riddles that had to be read from right to left. Thus, it is not surprising to hear the theory that he also introduced musical notes into his Last Supper.
Years ago, when experts studied the posture of the Apostles’ hands and then replaced the hands with musical notes, they came up with a kind of Gregorian psalm. Giovanni Maria Pala went even further. He computerised the lines of music across the image, then turned not only the hands of Jesus and the apostles into notes, but also the loaves of bread on the table.
He connected the notes together, but heard nothing meaningful. Then he remembered that Leonardo wrote from left to right like normal people, but also from right to left. When he read the notes in this way, a 40-second melody sounded, like a requiem. It is said to sound best when played on an organ such as the one popular in the churches of Leonardo’s time.
He also understood how it should be played from the picture The Last Supper. Since the Apostles are divided into four groups of three, this is supposed to symbolise the three-quarter measure, which was quite typical in the 15th century.
There is at least one other explanation for the division of the apostles into four groups of three. Some see the four seasons in this arrangement, and recognise the signs of heaven in the posture of the hands instead of the notes. Since there are 12 apostles next to Jesus in the painting, this is thought to symbolise Leonardo’s connection to the universe. The number 12 has always been important in history, for example a year has 12 months, but what is more important for the proponents of this theory is that the horoscope is made up of 12 celestial signs. Thus the apostle on one side of the table is said to represent the ram and the last apostle on the other side of the table the fish, and Jesus is said to be the sun.
Giovanni Maria Pala did not see it in the painting, but when he connected the notes he found an unusual ancient symbol, supposedly written in Hebrew. While the theory of the number 12 and celestial signs is far-fetched, the musical one seems plausible, but the one by Slavisa Pesci, a computer expert, is a little less plausible.
The original painting of the Last Supper, insofar as it is still original after the restoration, has been overlaid by computer with a transparent mirror image of the same painting. He then saw an image of a small child clutching a baby in the background. He did not claim that this was the child of Mary Magdalene and Jesus, as some believe, such as those who also believe that the apostle sitting next to Jesus in the painting is in fact Mary Magdalene.
Since she is sitting on Jesus’ right side, she is supposed to represent the female half of the brain, and Jesus the left half. These two halves attract each other, merge and form a whole, according to the proponents of this theory, Leonardo was telling us.
He chose the colours accordingly: he associated blue with the feminine principle and red with the masculine principle. Thus, Jesus wears a red dress with a blue overlay, and the supposed Mary Magdalene wears a blue dress with a red overlay. This is thought to symbolise the balance between the left and right sides of the brain.
Slavisa Pesci did not notice this, but at high magnification, he saw, besides the child in the picture, the cup standing in front of Jesus and the apostles, who are not really there. The knights are supposed to be sitting at the beginning and end of the table.
This theory is full of holes, but there are fewer in the claim that the apostles are based on living people. Before Leonardo started painting the apostle who would betray Jesus (fifth from left), he supposedly went to the dungeons of Milan to find the right face for his negator.
Kidneys on the wall of the Sistine Chapel
In keeping with the traditions of those days, the images painted by Michelangelo Buonarotti on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel between 1508 and 1512 are also alive. He knew well how to paint a body to reflect the real one as authentically as possible. In his early teens, at the court of Lorenzo de’Medici, he had watched the doctors of the time dissecting, and by the age of 18 he knew how to dissect a body himself.
His early interest in anatomy was reawakened when he wanted to publish a book on anatomy for artists and to illustrate a text on anatomy by the pathologist Realdo Colombo. The two men had met in 1549 because of Michelangelo’s health problems: he was plagued by kidney stones and was treated by Colombo.
Michelangelo also suffered from frequent urinary stones in his later years, and his correspondence suggests that he may have been plagued by kidney stones from an early age. It is also quite possible that obstructive nephropathy, in which urinary output is impaired and kidney function is reduced, contributed to his death.
What do his health problems have to do with the images on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? A nephrologist has noted that Michelangelo’s poetry and drawings show a heightened interest in the kidneys, and this is particularly pronounced in The Separation of Earth and Water: the Creator’s mantle is said to be in the shape of a right kidney cut in half.
Michelangelo is said to have attempted to show the separation of solid (earth) from liquid (water), proving, among other things, that he knew the anatomy and function of the kidneys as well as anyone did at the time.
No one doubts that he was very familiar with anatomy, but the fact that he painted a kidney on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is a little more so. It seems that everyone sees what they want to see in the paintings on the ceiling of the chapel and, surprisingly, the imagination of doctors is particularly receptive to Michelangelo’s supposed secret messages.
Brains above the altar
After 500 years of seeing nothing but what was painted in the frescoes, which depict scenes from the Old Testament over 520 metres of space, neurosurgeons Ian Suk and Rafael Tamargo have now seen it for themselves.
Njiju was drawn to the scene of the Separation of Light and Darkness, painted right above the altar, which shows how God separated the light from the darkness. They found it strange. Something was wrong with the god’s neck. Their eyes drifted from the god’s chest to his neck and suddenly they saw what they thought was an accurate outline of the brainstem, or the rear lower part of the brain, which allows the basic functions of life, such as breathing, to function smoothly.
Then they photographed a model of the brain and compared it to the shadows on the neck of God. It is true, they concluded, there is a brain painted on it, exactly in God and exactly above the altar.
Whether this is true or not, of course, no one can say for sure, but it is true that scholars have long wondered why Michelangelo painted such a fanciful neck for a god when he knew anatomy so well. On top of that, he illuminated it in an unusual way. The figures in this fresco are lit diagonally from the lower left, while the god’s neck is lit as if it were the centre of attention, directly and perceptibly from the right.
Suk and Tamargo are convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that the neck of the god is not an accident, but one of the messages left on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo. However, what is interesting in this scene is not only the neck, which hides a human brain, but also the background.
Researchers have long been puzzled why the cloth surrounding the god is wrinkled when it is not in any of the other paintings. It is, they concluded, because it is in fact the human spinal cord, rising up towards the brain stem on the god’s neck. At his waist, the fabric is again pleated in a particular way, and this is thought to represent the optic nerves running from the eyes.
What is this supposed to mean? Michelangelo supposedly intended it to be a subtle representation of the clash between science and religion. He was a religious man, but he despised the opulence of the Church and the corruption that reigned within it. For this reason, he was at odds with the Church and saw himself as a sufferer. So he lent his face to two figures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Both were tortured: one was skinned alive, the other had his head cut off.
Disillusioned with the Church, Michelangelo turned to spiritualism, which taught that we can communicate directly with God. So the brain above the altar may not have been about the clash of religion and science, but Michelangelo was using it to communicate that with intelligence and observation coming from the brain, we don’t need the Church to access God.
Maternity
But how did the Sistine Chapel attract doctors in the first place? It all started in 1990, when gynaecologist Frank Lynn Meshberger published an article in a professional medical journal in which he looked closely at the fresco of the Creation of Adam.
After looking closely at its anatomy, he came up with the idea that Michelangelo had deliberately spent so long adjusting the images on it until the right half of the painting resembled a brain. For example, the angels’ legs spread out like peas are supposed to symbolise the large pituitary gland, which is located on the underside of the brain, and the green ribbon fluttering from the mantle is one of the arteries connecting the neck and the brain.
His idea was immediately picked up by other doctors, who began to dissect the image themselves. They, too, found that the corrugated mantle surrounding God was in the shape of a brain. But if this is true, then the interpretation of the picture is no longer what it once was, when it was believed that God’s hand reaching out to Adam was giving him life. Now he is supposed to be giving him intellect, which Michelangelo believed to be a gift from God. God is thus said to be sitting on a brain that is in the shape of a real brain, cut in half vertically down the middle.
But Meshbergl’s colleague, gynaecologist Andrea Tranquilli, did not see a brain in The Creation of Adam. The corrugated mantle or bubble that surrounds God and the angels is in fact in the shape of a womb, with a placenta still inside, he revealed. Michelangelo was thus to announce to the public that Adam was formed from a womb and a human placenta.
The hands of God and Adam stretched out towards each other are said to represent the umbilical cord by which the child is nourished, and the wide green band is not an artery but the flow of amniotic fluid from the womb.
Enough? For some, no. They argue that the womb in the picture is not just any womb, but the womb just after the baby was born, which is why the fabric in the picture is also wrinkled. If only the womb were depicted, the fabric of the cloak would supposedly be smooth, but since after birth the womb is wrinkled like a balloon with no air left in it, so is the cloak.
The scene is actually of a woman reclining. Her body is said to be represented by the blue of Adam’s background, and her breasts and nipples are clearly visible above Adam’s head. Thus, God is said to be sitting on the womb from which the child has just been born, while Adam rests on the woman’s body.
Michelangelo’s feud with the Pope
Apparently, everyone really sees what they want to see in the pictures. For example, Rabbi Benjamin Blech and Vatican tour guide Roy Doliner see in Michelangelo’s painting of the Sistine Chapel a “bridge” between the Roman Catholic Church and the Jewish faith. The figures painted on the ceiling, they say, form what are in effect Hebrew omens.
The bodies of David and Goliath, for example, display the sign gimel, which in the Kabbalah, a collection of ancient esoteric teachings, symbolises the word g’vurah, or power. They also found a whole series of images on the ceiling that are actually words. Most of them, of course, come from Jewish tradition, at least according to them, but they also claim that all the figures on the ceiling are of Jewish origin and that Michelangelo’s tree of life is not an apple tree, but a fig tree, which is consistent with Jewish tradition.
Michelangelo’s rebellious Michelangelo was meant to ask people to question why they had forgotten their roots. This, they say, could have been because he had learned about Judaism in his youth, when he was at the court of the Medici.
This theory has many opponents, most vocal of course in the Vatican. There is not the slightest possibility that Michelangelo could have done such a thing without the Pope’s consent, they say, but the Vatican also denies vehemently that there is a brain floating above the altar of the Sistine Chapel, or that Michelangelo would indulge in an attack on Pope Julius II on its ceiling.
The two men were in each other’s hair, and so Michelangelo is said to have used the prophet Zechariah to confront the Pope. He gave the prophet his face and painted two lovely little angels behind him. One is holding the other around the neck, his fingers supposedly forming a fig. In those days, it was an obscene gesture, the equivalent of today’s vulgar phrase for sending someone somewhere. According to a rabbi and a tourist guide, Michelangelo did indeed send the Pope somewhere, although no one noticed it until they were five centuries old.
In 1950, Venezuelan diplomat Joaquin Diaz Gonzales did not see anything so striking on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but he recognised the outlines of Dante in the Last Judgement and saw Jesus on the cross.
But it is not only Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci who attract enthusiastic seekers of secret messages; Domenico Ghirlandaio, Michelangelo’s teacher, for example, has also completely derailed them. In the painting of Mary and Saint Giovannino, a man stands in the background, looking up at the sky and shielding his eyes with his hand to ward off the glaring light. A dog stands next to him, its mouth wide open. He, too, is staring at the sky. The gaze of both men rests on something oval, from which thin shafts of light emerge.
The painting is of an unidentified flying object, UFO enthusiasts claim, and it proves that extraterrestrial beings were visiting us at least as early as the 15th century, when the painting was made. They are not hindered by the fact that Renaissance paintings often show shepherds and dogs looking up at the sky. It is true that they were usually gazing at angels or stars, but they were also sometimes depicted as fire, comets, clouds, celestial chariots or anything else that might take the form of an unidentified flying object.
No, it’s a spacecraft, insist the Unidentified Flying Object theory. It is painted to attract attention and has no wings resembling an angel, let alone an angelic body. No doubt. For them, for others, of course, it is.
But the painting hanging in the Vecchio Palace in Venice is controversial not only because it is floating in the air, but also because of its authorship. In fact, it is not even clear who painted it. It is said to have come from the brush of Domenico Ghirlandaio, but there are at least two other painters in the running, Jacopo del Sellaio and Sebastiano Mainardi. The latter was Ghirlandaio’s apprentice and brother-in-law, so the painting could easily be mistakenly attributed to Ghirlandaio.
There is no doubt who the author of the painting Dutch Proverbs, originally titled The Madness of the World, is. The Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder clearly intended to depict the universal stupidity of man before he decided to paint the traditional proverbs that abounded in the Netherlands in those days.
By 1559, when The Dutch Proverbs was published, he had painted twelve of them, but each on his own canvas. Now he has combined 112 of them in one, or more or less, by depicting miniature people and animals participating in a piece of wisdom or folly.
In this way, he portrayed the society of the time, a little grotesque, a little tragicomic and a little sinful, often painting stupidity in blue and sin and shamelessness in red.
He tried to illustrate each proverb with a human being. For example, a man who fell from a horse to a donkey represented a business failure, a man who can’t reach the second loaf of bread can’t handle money … He also painted well-known proverbs such as swimming against the current, big fish eat small fish, banging your head against a wall, armed to the teeth and the like, and sometimes he would combine some of them if they fitted visually.
Who knows whether we have so far deciphered all the proverbs he has tried to put forward, but his picture does not leave much meat on the bones for conspiracy theorists, although on the other hand it is true that they do not need tangible evidence for their claims. For example, in too many portraits, they at least find a hand posture that secretly signals that someone is a Freemason. Art is what one sees in it, but conspiracy theorists always see a little more to it.
