TANATA:

One of the very elaborate little games from hell which are available for you and your children to play on one of the many Da Vinci Code official websites features a little pop-up which reads: “Leonardo was known as a trickster who liked to hide secrets in plain sight — often encoded within his artwork.”

A trickster was he? Was he so much the trickster as Leonardo and his patron for “The Last Supper” were the trickees? Because surely what Leonardo painted for the Duke of Milan Ludovico Sforza, a.k.a., “the Moor,” on a refectory wall (a refectory being a room used for communal meals in a religious institution) was not the “sacred” painting that we see today in a reproduced form. What learned clergymen or nuns would have sat in the refectory eating and talking and looking at “The Last Supper,” and seeing that there were only eleven male disciples in a work painted by Leonardo, who was a well-known and celebrated artist by 1498 when the fresco was completed? Can you imagine the buzz, which would have been nothing like what we should expect to hear today?

I can imagine in the 15th century, before Ludovico was deposed in 1499, the refectory diners asking one another, “Who is that strange woman in Leonardo’s new fresco?” Or we might have heard, “Where is the disciple whom Jesus loved … John?” To which someone else would have replied, “Um, well, Leonardo, the hack, must have left him out” — except, of course, no one would have called Leonardo who had been in the duke’s employ for 18 years … a hack. If Mary Magdalene is in dispute today as having a substantive role among the twelve disciples or the 70 original apostles, you can imagine that learned people living during the Italian Renaissance would have been dumbfounded.

“Why are they eating fish instead of lamb? Why is it midday when Passover starts at sundown? Why are they drinking from wine glasses, and why are there … 13 of them? Where is the cup of Jesus, the chalice? And what is that hand with a knife doing sticking out of Judas’ back?” And they would have asked such questions and been dumbfounded, because a number of versions of the last supper meal depicting Jesus and his twelve male disciples celebrating Passover had already been painted and no doubt seen. Hit the link and see for yourself.

In fact, before Leonardo began his fresco in 1495, there had already been 15 — count them, 15 — painted versions of the last supper by such artists as Duccio, Pietro Lorenzetti, Jaume Serra, Betram von Minden, Master of Raigon, Sasetta, Andrea del Castagno, Jaume Baco Jacomart … and on and on. And none, not a single one of these paintings, features a woman, but rather a young man sleeping with his head usually on the table, and nowhere near Jesus’ “breast.” I mean, the beloved disciple was sleepy, he not actually being one of the twelve, as we have pointed out, but he wasn’t gay.

And he was not one of the sons of thunder. And get this (and we’ve provided a link), people still persist in saying that Mary is Zebedee’s John, the son of thunder, who was a delicate waif of a fisherman. Check out this site where that claim is made. This site claims that Zebedee’s John was often painted with delicate, feminine features. Well, we’re looking right now at the first 15 versions painted, and one, maybe two at the most depict Zebedee’s John as looking youthfully masculine, not really feminine at all. Men had long hair in those days, but they didn’t have hair as long as Mary’s nor hands like her’s … nor would they have had a hint of a bosom.

And let us add that anyone who happens to know anything about Jewish traditions in those days could tell you that women were untouchables, in a sense, especially hookers. Would Mary, the mother of John Mark (Acts xii. 12), a wealthy African woman have allowed a “ho” into her house … let alone the Jewish men? Women were kept at arm’s length in biblical times, until privacy could be arranged. Being a Jewish man caught with a strumpet was like being caught with your pants down in the middle of Times Square … because everyone would know it.

No, it is not Leonardo who is the trickster, but the trickee, as all of us are, as we have been. I would so love to debate Dan Brown face to face and some of the producers for Sony Pictures who produced The Da Vinci Code film. They could not answer these questions, not without squirming. And why would they be squirming, these movie executives? Because, we believe, they were in on producing and launching the whole Da Vinci Code franchise. Probably long before the book was written.

(Let us pause for a moment and ask who is this dude … or chick above and to the right? Ru Paul? No, no. It is a man named John, but not Zebedee’s John … painted, oddly enough on a piece of walnut wood. Wood? Folk art! It’s not Zebedee’s John who happens to be missing from the “The Last Supper.” Entirely. It’s back enough that John Mark was left out. No, this is supposed to be John the Baptist … and doing what with his finger goodness only knows? Pointing to the upper room? No, John had been beheaded long before Jesus was himself arrested. Maybe he, or she, is giving Dan Brown the “up yours.”

But here’s the key thing to note about this suspicious Leonardo painting: Get hold of a version of “The Last Supper,” and look at a closeup of “Mags,” and notice how strikingly similar they look. The positioning of the hair and everything. And we also detect a weird, oddly tilting of the head. But perhaps we’re just being paranoid. This may be another attempt by Leonardo to paint a young man without a beard, at which he allegedly stunk, as some people have outrageously suggested. And then this work would be yet more obfuscation to hide the fact that John Mark was painted out of “The Last Supper.” This code business is getting curiouser and curiouser.)

We may never know, fully, all we would like to know. The glass through which we look darkly now has grown more opaque with the deceptive intrusions of enemies of Christianity, which seems to me to be a strong apologetic argument for the faith in themselves: if it can be shown that deceit is being used to discredit something, in this case Jesus and the faith he has inspired, the people on the receiving end of the deceptive assault — sheep led to slaughter, so to speak — should be sympathetic figures. One would think. But, of course, what matters to the enemies of Christianity, probably without their knowing it, is bashing for the sake of bashing, for the catharsis it brings them to tee off on those who have made them feel guilty, although they would never admit that.

I can understand why someone would in his or her own mind resent Christianity, if it reminded them that they had a decision they might have to make, to go from being on the outside to being included among the flock on the inside, if they wanted salvation and redemption — and not from just a Jewish man, or a Ashkenazi, European Jew, mind you, but a man of multiple races, as we have speculate. Believing that you may have to do something that you don’t want to do to save yourself … would produce anger in such a circumstance. Being a Christian, a devout one,is a silent statement to those who don’t concur, that they may be in a world of trouble. But I’m not judging anyone as I say that. And so, here we are — acting out our right to defend the faith, without going after anyone but the deceivers, the grievers of the spirit. That’s not being an uptight, bigoted Christian — not if one’s motives are pure, which is to help anyone who wants it to find hope.

If we succeed in the process of convincing any of those people who detest Christianity and Christians that our motives are pure, and it is we who are the victims of unfair assaults via deceit, then that will make us glad. If you’re a Christian and you should ever have the occasion of having someone attack Jesus or your faith one to one, what would be the effect if you could get the anti-Christian to agree that Christianity has been targeted by people, using known falsehoods, to wipe out the faith?

We don’t want to hurt or condemn anyone, except those who would rob you and me of the truth. And we don’t want to hurt anybody. We will state the truth, when we find it, and call a liar a liar if he’s lying. That’s fair isn’t it? We don’t think we’re any better than anyone else because we believe that Jesus offers hope and light instead of darkness, but as Christians we don’t have to play the game where our opposition is using deceit to beat us. That is a hard message to convey to people who are certain we just want to smack them across the head with a Bible. To each his own, we say. So, let’s proceed to flay the tricksters, since they have thrown down the gauntlet.

To that end of conveying the truth, we have been asking, and we will continue to ask because we resent having our nose rubbed in the Gnostic media blitzing, which is the Da Vinci Code franchise, whether the codes being suggested are legitimate, or subterfuge. Whether there are codes … or in fact a coverup at work in the campaign that swirls around a fresco in Milan with a sacred subject, which raises more questions than it answers, and which fell apart. The explanation that Leonardo for a brief moment in his career became a hack … is not plausible. It flies in the face of reasonable intelligence. If, for example, the Rolex people were being accused of making shoddy watches, because knock-offs were falling apart, the Rolex people are completely within their rights to say to the public — we are not the victimizers here, but the victims, just like those of you who bought fake Rolexes. Agreed?

How many codes exist in any of Leonardo’s other paintings? we’d like to ask. Is this another one, another painting with an alleged code, which is depicted here? … which coincidentally features a man named John making a strange and mysterious pointing gesture. We wonder if any Carbon 14 dating has been done on this piece. And we can’t help but wonder what it is that this version of John the Baptist is doing, beyond just acting all code-like. Codes, treasure hunts, letterboxing, geocaching … have you ever noticed how hung up the enemies of Christianity are of throwing out mysteries? They know we love them, that’s why? And why do we love them … because life is a paradoxical mystery, where at the end death becomes new life. We wonder if this Mary Jean might be drying his or her nails. Perhaps one of Morton Smith’s allegedly perverted friends had something to do with this, seeing as Mr. Smith was engaged in working out his guilt over his homosexually, according to Dr. Craig Evans, which resulted in the secret gospel of Mark and the cheesy little bogus scene between the youth in white linen … and the man Jesus who had just raised him from the dead.

No doubt, if a mystic had just raised me from the dead, a male, the first thing I would want to do is go homo on the guy, which would be a real stretch because I’m not gay, never have been, and neither was Jesus. So is this really a work by Leonardo Da Vinci? It’s a question that we would like to have answered. And here’s another one … who designed the cover of the Da Vinci Code novel, upon which appears a sneaky little code, supposedly. Would a cover artist have done this on his own … for a book upon which Doubleday is supposed to have taken a risk? We haven’t checked this out yet, but we think we should. Why? Because that would suggest to us that there was elaborate advanced planning for this besmirching, obscuring campaign leveled against Jesus and his African friend John Mark. Oooo conspiracy. Conspirators are notoriously good at making those who want some facts out to be nutjobs.

Well, we ask once again, why would anyone want to obscure John Mark, the African scholar, as “the disciple whom Jesus loved?” We think it’s because Rome and all of their secret buddies through the years and centuries have been patted on the back, but supernatural beings, gods, as it were, and told they killed the right guy … and that the real messiah, an angel of light, who perhaps went to the same dermatologist as Michael Jackson, is Lucifer.

Way to get flim-flammed by the father of lies, my Faustian friends. I don’t suppose there’s any way that you could back out now? No, I didn’t think so. Well, enjoy your spaceship to ride to hell. No, we shouldn’t say that. We feel for you, we really do, having experienced supernatural terror as a child, which is a not too uncommon reality for a lot of people online. God, because he must, I suppose, allows such to occur in a person’s life, for the purposes of faith, because that is the dynamic, at least as we have observed how suffering and fear, chronic panic attacks, etc. affects our lives. We can’t help but run to the light. Chronic, inexplicable fear, from out of the blue, is no fun at all. Dreadful, desperate, utterly maddening, but I survived. And you can, too. Mine has stemmed from childhood, various forms of abuse, the hallucination thing, and brain trauma and PTSD from the service into which we were drafted in 1972.

So, flim-flamming is all around us. And wait till we get to Ephesus in an upcoming post … and find out where Mary, the mother of Jesus, lived and died … in a little stone house, which was rebuilt in 1951! Pope Benedict the whatever (we call him “Arnold”) recently held Mass at this little stone house where Jesus’ mother was supposed to have lived, while the fisherman was presumably busy writing his little fanny off. Musta gotten hot as hell for poor old Mary though, in that stone oven. Maybe that’s what did her in, living in an oven. Some caretaker this son of thunder must have been. Only … Mary died and was buried in Jerusalem. And, as Acts 1.14 tells us … Jesus’ mother had plenty of sons … to take care of her. Real ones! ergo, the John and Mary at Jesus’ cross he told to behold one another … are John Mark and his real mother Mary! You think we ought to call the Vatican and straighten them out, how it is really an African whom we ought to be calling St. John the Divine? They’ve obviously known this all along, and may even now be sweating it out, hating themselves for being so stupid and gullible, which evil invariably is.

Evil is not as smart as the rest of us, that’s part of what motivates them … they hate it. I know evil humans do. You touch a nerve and make an evil person feel guilt when he or she doesn’t want to, has never wanted to, and look out for Dysfunction Junction. They also hate you because you’re creative and have superior intelligence, always comparing themselves to you, while you’re just trying to be their friends. It has always thrown me when the people I am trying to be nice to might just happen to hate my guts, for whatever reason — looks, a good work ethic, friends, a family which loves you.

So … are the true tricksters those who turned “The Last Supper” into a comedy of errors when they botched the effort to repaint this fresco … on dry plaster, not knowing that they should reapply a layer of wet plaster, which must be present to create a fresco? Maybe they, the hereTRICKSTERS, just ran out of time, which would explain a lot … like the hand gripping a knife behind Judas’ back with no person attached to it. I can envision a Three Stooges scene where one of the Stooges forgot to paint out this glaring mistake and the Moe heretic screaming, “You knucklehead!” and proceeding to poke the numbskull in the eyes, slug him in the stomach and konk him on the head.

“Now whatta we gonna do, you imbecile?!”

Was Leonardo such a trickster that it was he who, deciding to experiment a little, chose to paint a fresco onto dry plaster? That knucklehead Leo. But how tricky is that? Is tricky the right word in this instance? “Impractical” would be a better word. “Stupid” and reckless” would be better words yet. “Very, very highly unlikely” is the best response we can offer.

It practically took Leonardo longer to paint his “dry-plaster fresco” — 1495 to 1498 — than the pigment of the fresco actually clung to the wall it was painted on. “The Last Supper” began to disintegrate, crack, peel and chip within decades after it’s completion. And someone decided to install a door in the wall, which partially obliterates the disintegrated “masterpiece.”

Three years work is an awful lot of work to play a trick on … who? Leonardo himself? And it is a very implausible trick when the basic, indisputable truth is … Leonardo was obsessively perfectionistic.

Do you think Leonardo was known to be a “trickster” to his boss, a ruthless man, who became the duke of Milan by locking his sister-in-law in a tower? And this is a relevant question because it is this man who was the actual patron for “The Last Supper.” In other words, the man who signed Leonardo’s paycheck was the man who requested that the painting be painted … and not off somewhere in seclusion where the duke alone could see it … but on a widely seen cafeteria wall in an official building, which now is the Santa Maria delle Grazie chapel. Can you imagine the duke saying, “Sure, you tricky rascal, let’s see how badly you can botch this one, and everyone can see it”?

I rode by that chapel once, but at the last minute decided not to go in. The cab driver in Milan had said in sketchy English, “It is in shambles.” I remember thinking at the time in the mid 90s that this man would definitely not be my choice for minister of tourism or the president of the chamber of commerce in Milan, but now I know he was speaking the truth. Jeepers, there are frescoes which were painted three centuries before “The Last Supper,” which look like first-run prints compared to the “experimental” masterpiece by that knucklehead Leonardo.

Well, as we drove on, I thought, so much for greatness. But then, when this shambly “dry-plaster fresco” (which, of course, is an oxymoron) became the talk of the town in 2006, when it was going to be in the movies, I decided to dust off my old art history texts and read up on the celebrated and most influential leader of the Lombardy school of painters in Italy in the 15th century, and one of the things I discovered was that Leonardo did all of his experimenting in his studio.

If he found a flaw in his pigment, for instance, if it didn’t mix well, even as expensive as art supplies were to come by, he’d throw the whole batch out. And why shouldn’t he have done that? I would do that … and I haven’t sold a painting in 10 years. Make that 15. But I can afford to do that, barely, but if your medium or surface are not worth the trouble of using them, you don’t use them.

You wouldn’t build an engine with old, crummy, dinged-up parts? Or bake a cake with eggs which were on the verge of going bad? Or submit a poem with spelling errors?

Maybe you would. But if you did these things for a living, and you were passionate about your work, it wouldn’t cross your mind to throw care to the wind. My inferred point, it should be obvious, is Leonardo didn’t have the last go at this fresco. Who would have changed it … and why? It wasn’t because they were code freaks, I’d wager to guess.

Now here is the REAL CODE. I call it THE MOOR’S CODE (cute, huh?):

Was Leonardo such a trickster that the two people meant depicted in “The Last Supper” around whom the “mysterious code” revolves … just happen to have the same names … as the two people who actually hosted the last supper Passover meal in an upper room of their home in Jerusalem? Hmm.

What a coincidence. Now, right there … that’s your code, baby. You’ve got Mary, who is, interchangeably, John, the son of Zebedee, and then, you have John. Mary and John, John being the name of the man who is widely believed by the public, but not by Bible scholars, to be “the disciple who Jesus loved.”

Except, you don’t have a John in this painting. There is no “disciple whom Jesus loved,” a man who is referred to as “this man” in John 21.21. There is therefore no 12th male disciple, not one named John. There isn’t. And Mary (“Mags,” as we like to call her) has been alleged to be a man by suggesting that Leonardo had a problem painting young males who looked masculine. There are even some people who say that this woman really is John in drag.

Sorry. No Adam’s apple, her hands are too dainty. And Peter is speaking to her as if she is … “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” because it is Peter who nudges the beloved disciple and asks him to ask Jesus who is going to betray him.

“This man” John, however, is entirely absent from the painting. Perhaps, as a friend has suggested, he dropped his knife, which accounts for the one in a hand floating in midair without an arm behind Judas’ back — a photograph of which did not appear on Dan Brown’s website until people began pointing out this research oversight. Great writer, they say of this out of nowhere novelist whose work has been called superior to that of John Le Carre. But he is a lousy researcher, providing he planned and wrote this novel himself … or at all.

And yet, it is a man named John, very, very likely, who asks Jesus who it is who is going to betray him. Interestingly, Andrew (third from the left, who looks rather effeminate with his hands raised in surprise and dismay) and the others who are grappling with Jesus’ grim news, which Jesus expounds upon at the urging of a man named John, he being self identified in John’s Gospel with “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” they are all responding to a question which is supposed to be put to Jesus … by a man who doesn’t appear in the fresco!

Also very interesting in this screwy “masterpiece” is that Jesus’ alleged main squeeze, to his right, on the other side of the big, mysterious, symbolic “V” (please), could not be more aloof and disinterested that Jesus is about to be betrayed. Women are fickle. So we have a Mary, who could be a John, but then, of course, we would have no Mary, and no scandal. So, we must have a Mary, but we then have no John. Dear me. If you’re a big Mary fan, and boy they are out there in droves, apparently, and insist on her being present … well, that spells “trouble,” with a capital “T” which rhymes with “V.”

Is it as Troublesome as it is, this game of musical Marys and Johns, because the two people who actually hosted the meal were a mother and son named … Mary and John. I’d bet you my battered Opie Taylor lunch box it is Troublesome for just that reason. I tell you … that’s the code, right there.

And yet, Dan Brown the man of renown doesn’t mention a thing, not a single word, about this peculiar coincidence in his flawless novel. Nor does he mention the name of John. Not any John, who has always been believed to be “the disciple whom Jesus loved” and the man who asks Jesus who will betray him. Brown has sold 65 million books and made a fortune. I get 1,000 hits a month, if I’m lucky, and I don’t even carry any of those tacky Google ads on my site nor do we beg for donations, like we deserve them. But I think we have it right … and I think Mr. Brown is either a lousy researcher, or he is culpable in the coverup, if he wrote the novel at all.

The coverup has precisely to do with the fact that the Mary and John who are in, or are supposed to be in “The Last Supper” … have the same names as the African mother and son who hosted then event in their nicely appointed home in Jerusalem — Mary, this African woman, having been a woman of means from Cyrene (Libya) in North Africa, from whence she and her son John, who would become John Mark, fled to escape persecution, religious — they being Jews — as well as racial. Racism, reportedly, still exists in Libya.

So, what is this guy named John doing? He can’t be pointing to Jesus in heaven … because Jesus, as the Da Vinci Code infers, even though Brown calls himself a Christian … was only a man. It takes a lot of intellectual maneuvering to figure this painting out … unless you call it what it actually is — a coverup and a fraud. Well how do we know this was repainted? Why would it have been? The identity of Leonardo’s patron answers that question. Who was he? His nickname was … “the Moor.”

— rcg