Da Vincis The Last Supper may harbour the elusive Da Vinci Code

Leonardo da Vincis famous painting The Last Supper contains in it a hidden musical score, a sacred text and a three-dimensional chalice, according to a musician.

Washington, November 10 : Leonardo da Vinci's famous painting The Last Supper contains in it a hidden musical score, a sacred text and a three-dimensional chalice, according to a musician.

Giovanni Maria Pala writes about his observations about the painting in the book La Musica Caleta (The Hidden Music), to be published in Italy next week

"This is not another spin-off of Dan Brown's novel (The Da Vinci Code). It's real. I've always been intrigued by the possibility of finding a (piece of) music in the Last Supper, but I would have never imagined to find myself decoding a secret message by Leonardo," Discovery News quoted him as saying.

It is said that Leonardo was an accomplished lyre player who also enjoyed hiding puzzles in his work.

Pala claims that he has discovered a sacred hymn and text, along with mystic symbols in da Vinci's degraded masterpiece.

"I was first struck by the tablecloth, which features horizontal lines but also vertical lines in correspondence with the pieces of bread. This made me think immediately of music notes on a pentagram. I tried to play the notes, but it did not work. Looking at single details wasn't the correct approach," he said.

The musician further said that The Last Supper should be seen "as a harmonic whole, in which each detail has a precise meaning."

He revealed that looking at the Apostles, represented in groups of three, he got the hint that the piece should be played in 3/4-time, like much 15th-century music. However, it was their hands, always in relation to the breads on the table that provided the real score, to be read from right to left, in line with Leonardo's writing.

"I marked the pieces of bread on the table and the Apostle's hands as music notes. Then I drew a pentagram over the scene between the tablecloth and Jesus' face. I couldn't believe my ears when I played the music. It sounded really solemn, almost like a requiem," he said.

When Pala united the notes to each other by lines, he observed that they produced strange symbols, similar to ancient cuneiform script.

The symbols were produced before Father Luigi Orlando, a biblical scholar at the Antonianum Pontifical University in Rome, for checking whether they contained any message.

It was found that the cuneiform writing was a sentence written in ancient Hebrew: "bo nezer usbi," which means "with Him consecration and glory".

"At this point I was totally into this puzzle. I placed the nine letters of the ancient Hebrew text one on top of the other, following an ascending path, which is the direction of the hands of the first six Apostles. The result was a strange image," Pala said.

He noticed that on the table, to the right, Leonardo painted a piece of bread split in half.

"I thought of this as a hint to duplicate that image," Pala said.

Upon being stacked on top of each other and duplicated, he said, the resulting image represented the chalice.

Pala rotated the image of the chalice further, and found a motif very similar to the decorations in Santa Maria delle Grazie, the church where Leonardo painted The Last Supper in 1497.

"I think there are too many things fitting together, and cannot just be coincidences," Pala said.

ANI