The Weird, Obscene, Disturbing… da Vinci?
Posted by Jeremy on November 29th, 2007
First off, my host seems to be having issues on how to correctly configure MySQL, so you’ll see occasional ‘can not connect to database messages’ for awhile until they fix it. I keep emailing them. Then again, when you pay $5 a month for all I get, I guess you can’t be to picky, eh? Anyway…..
Leonardo da Vinci is a name everyone is familiar with. The original hacker and Renaissance man, he’s done it all - math, engineering, invention, painting, sculpting, etc etc1.
The guy was arguably a bit of a crackpot as well, crudely encrypting his notes by writing them backwards via a mirror - protecting his words to all but the very vain.. apparently.
Anyway.
There’s an Italian group that calls itself the Mirror of the Sacred Scriptures and Paintings World Foundation. They seem to think da Vinci and his contemporaries did much much more with mirrors then anyone could have imagined - and it’s been right in front of us the entire time.
The conventions found in classical art are theorized to actually be cues as to how to via these images via a mirror. The outstretched hands, characters staring off into space and the Leonardesque gesture are all examples of literal pointers on how to interpret the works.
An article in Snarfd2 has reproduced four of these ’secret images’ found in da Vinci’s paintings. Take a look.
My Take: I would love for this to be true, but the skeptic in me just doesn’t think it’s true. Although Leonardo is known to be a bit of a trickster and as a universal genius we’re still attempting to interpret his work I just don’t think he intended for this. I’m certain that if you ‘truly believed’ you could see these types of images in anything. Never the less, it’s still pretty slick.
Footnotes listed in the above post:- And don’t forget sodomy. Then again, he is Italian [↩]
- Reproduced from la Repubblica [↩]
November 29th, 2007 at 4:28 pm
Try this Jeremy, this is Leonardo at his sneakiest and naughtiest:
http://altreligion.about.com/library/davinci/bl_differentdvc13.htm
Karen
December 3rd, 2007 at 3:23 pm
An Art History topic? I have to leave a reply…
I am with you, the theory is crap.
There is a huge gravitation to “read into” and create elaborate conspiracies around historical art, (let us not forget that Dan Brown built a lucrative career out of this fascination). However, the world of Renaissance art is boring and centers around Marxist drives, in fact I would argue that Da Vinci, was bound to painting contracts stifling his creative input, as were most in his day. Painters of this time period were driven by commission and contract, and to make their patrons happy they did not take many “artistic freedoms.” Some contracts were so specific that they limited subject matter, representation, and even amount of specific color. I think crackpot theories apply 21st century logic to a time period that was mired in restrictions on art, both politically and socially…and that’s my dumb response.
Gaffa.