The Real Da Vinci Code

Tonight 9pm on Channel 4.

http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/W/weirdworlds/da_vinci_code/index.html

Might be worth watching.

 

Definately. Apparently Tony Robinson does a real hatchet job on the book.

 

Watched it . Quite enjoyed it .

 

Yep - very good. I don't think any intelligent person really ever thought there was much in Dan Brown's "theories" in the book (which aren't even his own) but it was still an entertaining read. Angels & Demons is a lot better though IMO. I've read all 4 of his books now and they all pretty much follow the same formula. Still, the make plane journeys less dull

Michael.

 

Saw bits of the prog last night (in between installing my new Music First Passive ) thought it was a reasonable job. Read a few articles off the net re Priory of Sion and Opus Dei so wasn't surprised by much of the content I must say.

Read up on the Knights Templars a while back (check out for example "Supremely Abominable Crimes" which looks at the dissolution of the Knights Order in C12 (I think).

Thought Da Vinvi Code was OK, subsequently read one of his others (so poor I can't remember which), dissuaded me from trying any others I must confess.

 

I think he is currently being sued by Michael Baigent, one of the authors of "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail", from which much of the Prieuré de Sion stuff is taken, ditto the whole business of a bloodline of Jesus coming to France. In some ways, "Da Vinci" is HBHG in a novel (in more ways than one) form.

I liked "Angels and demons" at the start but went right off it at the totally bananas ending. What with Tom Clancy going bad ("Teeth of the Tiger" must have been published on the morning of 1 April), it's hard to find anything lightly readable these days. (I've resorted to Harry Turtledove's alternative histories - at least good for a laugh).

 

I must add this though .
Personally I think the character sitting to the left of Jesus(as you view) in Da Vinci,s painting is a woman .
It has no bearing on any of the conspiracy theories (for me) , I just wonder what was going through the artists mind when he painted it . I also don,t understand why there isn,t a written explanation as to why . After all he must have told someone or written something himself .
Any of the more knowledgeable out there read anything about this?
I,m presuming he was confident enough in his own power/ self worth by that time to be able to do this without the Church coming down on him like a tonne of bricks(or did they?) . But I,m only speculating .

 

Long hair, finger in the air? That'll be John the Baptist, that's the way Leonardo paints him. Fashion of the time.

 

No, to the left of Jesus as you view the painting. The one with the blonde perm.

 

Leonardo swung to the left, so he always liked to paint pretty boys.

 

Agreed , and one of the experts on the program was keen to point this out . He even showed anther example of a "pretty boy" .
The problem with this explanation is this . The pretty boy in the second picture looks like a pretty boy . It,s an effeminate picture .....but it can still be recognised as a boy .
The pretty boy in the "Last Supper" painting doesn,t look like a pretty boy , it looks like a woman , pure and simple and no amount of eye squinting or examples will change my mind on it .

 

Sorry, finally got round to watching the end of the program over the weekend.

John the Baptist being the second pretty boy refered to by kermit. In the Last Supper he has a biblical beard, still got his finger in the air though; the disciple under discussion is St John. There are very few Leonardo paintings that have survived (around 14 I think) though there are lots of drawings, so to draw any conclusions means doing so in relative isolation.

If you want something to ponder, first work out what sex Angels are then have a look at some other Leonardos. (eg the Virgin of the Rocks in either London or Paris)

 

Since John the Baptist had been minus a head for over a year at the time of the Last Supper (see, for example, Mark 6:14-29), how did he manage this?

 

Was that Salome with her "bring me his head on a plate" ?

The image refered to above was the individual St. John the Baptist now in the Louvre (Leonardo's last painting), which is of a young man with long hair and was shown in relation/contrast to the St. John in the Last Supper.

So in the Last Supper who is seated two to Christ's right, as you look at it, ie the first head as he is leaning behind the person next to him. The gesture of pointing up is one I had thought was associated with John the Baptist (ie pointing to the coming of Christ).

 

Just to return to the original program, I thought that the most interesting point was to do with the status of Mary Magdalen in the early church and how this changed over the years as the church became increasingly dominated by men. Was she in fact the author of one of the Gospels ?

 

Yes indeed.

Don't know the painting at all, but conceivably it is John, the Apostle of the same name, often said to be "the disciple whom Jesus loved" referred to in John's Gospel.

 

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Almost certainly not. The four in the New Testament are all pretty well identified, and their accuracy is testified to by the very large numbers of manuscripts available to scholars, some of them (the manuscripts, not the scholars, all appearances to the contrary) going back to the first century. Now the author of a Gospel is something else. There are a number of spurious "Gospels", and it is conceivable that MM could be the alleged author of one of these. However, scholars disregard these as fakes. There was a lot of stuff from the Gnostics, an early heresy. The word means "those who know", i.e., have secret knowledge that only the initiated know. The opposite is "agnostic", those who don't know.