Monday, July 30, 2007

Fun with mirrors

Apparently last week there was a flurry of activity concerning hidden messages in Leonardo's painting of the Last Supper.

Now Slavisa Pesci, an information technologist and amateur scholar, says superimposing the "Last Supper" with its mirror-image throws up another picture containing a figure who looks like a Templar knight and another holding a small baby.


Well certainly we wouldn't expect any random painting superimposed on its mirror image to show any recognizable shapes. Or would we?

I have included links to depictions of the original art. Click on the images to see a larger version of each.

  • Peter Paul Rubens, The Judgment of Paris.
    Mirrored Judgment of Paris
    Looks like an x-ray radiograph of a spine of a conjoined unpleasantness there in the middle surmounting a mass brown and foul. Overhead, there is a ghostly outline of the head of a bear - to which the twins seem to be paying homage (?). Indications are that a BAD THING is about to occur, definitely.

  • Pablo Picasso's Guernica (though I grabbed the original from another site).

    My gaze is drawn by the light-colored Latin cross just below dead center, then, zooming out, the way the pair of lightbulbs up top assume the place of eyes for a long-snouted animal face. So this we can take to be an indictment of the destructive powers of superego and id respectively.

  • William Blake's Ancient of Days. Ancient of Days, mirrored
    I see a cat's face clearly there, made up of the deity's brow and its mirror, with a backdrop of wings of a huge bird of prey. Something hearkening back to ancient egyptian worship perhaps? I kind of like how the compasses aren't precisely aligned on the centerline of the print.

  • A venereal diptych: Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus (folded along a horizontal axis) and Giorgone's Sleeping Venus
    Birth of Venus, mirrored
    Sleeping Venus, mirrored
    "Double your pleasure, double your fun!"

  • Michelangelo's Last Judgment

    Aaah, it's a giant blue Stormtrooper helmet!!!


If anyone runs with these ideas and gets a thesis out of them, I'd surely like a copy, thanks.

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