Could this possibly be for real? According to this report, Leonardo DaVinci might have encoded a musical composition within The Last Supper. If this is true, you just know this is going to turn up as the score of the next Biblical movie based on the life of Christ. Question is, would the Vatican own the rights, and will this set off a flurry of bids to purchase the rights for the work? Or, could it possibly end up in court? I have a hunch the Vatican would insist on full creative control over the movie’s content, so think more along the lines of Passion of the Christ rather than The Last Temptation of Christ.
Of course, there is always the possibility that, assuming this does turn out to be true, the score is not really worth a shit. Moreover, this brings up another question. Is somebody seeing something that is not really there? Could it be that a number of brush strokes might have inadvertently ended up looking like musical notes, with some following strokes being just of enough of a relative consistency to those first strokes that somebody might just be filling in blanks? Think of a Rorschach Test with the appearance of musical notes.
On the other hand, if it does turn out to be true, it could be big. What would have been the purpose of it? Could the musical score have been in Leonardo’s mind a kind of encoded prayer? If so, a prayer for what-for enlightenment to any who view the painting, perhaps, especially to those of the church charged with its safekeeping or to the clergy in general?
Why in the hell did he not just write the damn musical score outright, either instead of or in addition to encoding it within the painting? Was he assuming that it would be uncovered decades or centuries, or even millennia later, and therefore provide fresh inspiration to a whole new future generation? Leonardo must have been a very strange man.
Hat tip to Instapundit
