ROME, ITALY– An Italian musician says he has found a hidden code in Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper, and it is music. Giovanni Maria Pala, a 45-year-old musician, started investigating the painting in 2003, after hearing a tv show discussing the possibility of a musical composition hidden in the work.
In a book released Friday in Italy, Pala explains how he took elements of the painting that have symbolic value in Christian theology and interpreted them as musical clues.
Pala first saw that by drawing the five lines of a musical staff across the painting, the loaves of bread on the table as well as the hands of Jesus and the Apostles could each represent a musical note. In his book — “La Musica Celata” (“The Hidden Music”) — Pala also describes how he found what he says are other clues in the painting that reveal the slow rhythm of the composition and the duration of each note. The result is a 40-second “hymn to God” that Pala said sounds best on a pipe organ, the instrument most commonly used in Leonardo’s time for spiritual music.
Alessandro Vezzosi, a Leonardo expert and the director of a museum dedicated to the artist in his hometown of Vinci, said he had not seen Pala’s research but that the musician’s hypothesis “is plausible.”
The Last Supper was painted from 1494 to 1498 in Milan’s Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie.
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