-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thu, 6 Dec 2007 6:17 pm Subject: DaVinci's Mirror Did Da Vinci hide God's face in painting? By Aislinn Simpson Last Updated: 8:42pm GMT 06/12/2007 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/12/06/wdavinci106.xml A new storm is brewing in the world of Da Vinci theorists after a mysterious group claimed it has used mirrors to uncover hidden biblical images in some of the great master’s most famous works. The Mirror of the Sacred Scriptures and Paintings http://www.mirrorandart.com/ In recent years, art history scholars have unveiled Templar knights, Mary Magdalene, a child and a musical script hidden in the Italian’s paintings. These images, from the group's website, show how the original The Virgin and Child sketch (left) can be manipulated with mirrors to supposedly show the ancient Old Testament god Jahveh (right) It is well-documented that Da Vinci, who lived between 1452 and 1519, often wrote in mirror writing, either in an attempt to stop his rivals stealing his ideas or in a bid to hide his scientific theories, often deemed as subversive, from the powerful Roman Catholic Church. But now a group known as The Mirror of the Sacred Scriptures and Paintings World Foundation believes that he applied the same technique to some of his best-known creations, including the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper, to conceal mysterious faces and religious symbols. When applied to the sketch The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist, which hangs in London’s National Gallery, the authors say the mirror image reveals the ancient Old Testament god Jahveh, who "protects the soul of the body’s vices" and wears the Vatican’s crown. Their theory would explain why many of Da Vinci’s characters seem to be pointing or staring into space, as if searching for the Divine. The group claims they are indicating where the mirror should be placed to reveal the painting’s secrets. In the Virgin and Child sketch, they say, it explains why John the Baptist appears to be staring past Jesus into the distance. A similar face appears when a mirror is applied to the right hand shoulder of Mona Lisa, and the experts also claim to have found an upturned holy grail on the table in front of Christ in the celebrated Last Supper fresco. The mirror-technique is applied to another painting of John the Baptist to reveal the four-legged image of creation and the Tree of Life in Adam and Eve’s Garden of Eden. Again, John is pointing with both hands to the place where the mirror needs to be placed to reveal the "hidden" image. According to the group, the same technique was used by Michelangelo and Raphael, in artwork exhibited in the Vatican, and Renaissance artists including the neoclassicist Jacques Louis David. Similar images have also been found in famous paintings and sculptures of Buddha. The Mona Lisa supposedly shows a similar face The study’s authors wrote to the Vatican last year to explain their discovery, but received a lofty reply saying that while their findings would no doubt be the object of much discussion in the art history world, their ideas required "solid proof" and needed to be supported by a general consensus among art critics before they could be taken seriously. Critics of the project will claim the authors want to cash in on the worldwide fascination with Da Vinci conspiracy theories, brought to a head by the publication of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code and the subsequent Tom Hanks film. These featured the theory that the male figure on Christ’s immediate right is actually Mary Magdalene and the couple had descendants living in the modern world, and multiplied visits to sites all over the world to which Da Vinci was linked. The latest theory, expounded by The Mirror of the Sacred Scriptures and Paintings group, whose website www.mirrorandart.com, is owned by the Sacred and Divine Reason and Foundation Corp, follows the revelation in July by an Italian amateur scholar that the Last Supper contained a hidden image of a woman holding a child. The figure, he said, appeared when the fresco was superimposed with its mirror image and both were made partially transparent. ----------------- http://www.princetonol.com/groups/iad/lessons/middle/grid-drawings.htm "ANAMORPHIC IMAGES are those in which the painted image of an object has been distorted in such a way that the object becomes recognizable only by viewing it at an oblique angle or in some curved reflecting surface. "Anyone who has visited the National Gallery in London might have seen Hans Holbein's painting "The Ambassadors," in which an odd shape at the bottom of the canvas is seen to be a skull when viewed almost edge-on. Anamorphic images were something of a rage in the Renaissance, and Leonardo and Durer tried the technique as part of their studies of perspective. An eighteenth century innovation was to create anamorphs of paintings by famous artists. A seventeenth century book by Jean-Francois Niceron worked out the geometrical algorithms for producing anamorphic art (the planar and conical cases are pretty easy but cylinders are quite challenging), but this mathematical connection was lost through the centuries. Now, scientists at Guelph University (Ontario, Canada) have re-derived the transform equations needed for producing anamorphs. --(Hunt, Nickel, Gigault, American Journal of Physics, March 2000" (from American Institute of Physics ) "The underlying idea of transferring information from one grid to another has a long history in both mathematics and art. When the blank grid differs from the original grid, for example, a drawing can suffer intriguing distortions. In art, the result is sometimes called an anamorphic picture. Mathematically, you're looking at the results of a type of transformation or mapping. "To create one sort of anamorphic picture, you start with a piece of paper ruled into square cells and another ruled with the same number of trapezoids. Draw your picture on the square grid. Then carefully copy the contents of each square of the original grid to the corresponding trapezoid of the other grid, stretching the lines of the drawing to make sure everything fits together. You end up with a distorted version of the original picture. Interestingly, if you now look at the final drawing at the proper angle from the edge, it appears undistorted. "Artists have long used the same idea to create visual puzzles. In such examples, a viewer sees an object correctly only if he or she finds the right angle at which to look at the picture. One of the most famous examples is in a painting called "The Ambassadors," made by the German artist Hans Holbein, the Younger (1497-1543). It shows two men standing in front of tables overflowing with books, instruments, and globes (see http://www.mezzo-mondo.com/arts/mm/holbein/HOH006.html). "At their feet, the artist painted a weird shape that turns out to be a grinning skull when you hold the picture at a slant and view it in the right way. "Various artists have tried more elaborate schemes. It's possible, for example, to draw or paint a picture so that you can tell what it is only if you look at its reflection in a mirror shaped like a cylinder or a cone. Other pictures must be reflected in shiny spheres, mirrored pyramids, or other reflecting shapes to reveal their true identity." (Science News Online, Ivars Peterson. Check out AOL Money & Finance's list of the hottest products and top money wasters of 2007. ________________________________________________________________________ More new features than ever. 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