THE PAINTER AND THE CARPENTER:
LEONARDO’S LIFE SIZE PORTRAIT OF JESUS
CONTENTS
Prologue
The Unknown Artist. The Missing Journals. The Lost Secret
PART ONE: The Unknown Artist
1: The Outsider Destined to Paint
The origins of a precocious misfit. A childhood friendship with the Medici boys. Was Lisa a youthful sweetheart? Aged twenty, Leonardo is admitted to the Guild of Artists which guards both trade and greater secrets to protect its members.
2: The Last Supper: History or Theology?
The Nicene Creed adopted Paul’s account of events but Leonardo questioned tradition and diligently sought truth. During the 15th century the Church began to lose control. Forbidden books were brought to Florence from the Middle East and circulated in Florence under the Medicis’ rule.
3: How the Last Supper Was Painted Before Leonardo
The Church commissioned paintings to reinforce belief in an age when people could not read the Bible. The rulers of Europe wished to maintain the socio-economic order. Religious paintings were all about political power.
4: Leonardo Paints The Last Supper
Leonardo’s Last Supper expresses the Gnostic Gospels, not the New Testament. This is the real Da Vinci Code. The painting is an istoria, a narrative drama in 12 scenes with 19 figures, of whom 6 are concealed.
5: So Dark the Con of Man
The Madonna of the Rocks is connected to our mystery both chronologically and thematically. The two versions were painted before and after the Milan mural and the secret message of both concerns James the Just.
PART TWO: Turmoil and Heresy
6: The Italian States in Chaos and Conflict
It is impossible to grasp the circumstances of Leonardo’s life and careers without the historical context of the political instability: there was religious and territorial strife which involved him as a pre-eminent military engineer, inventor, and diplomat.
7: Friends in High Places
As a military engineer Leonardo traded secrets and moved in circles of power which protected him from his nonconformist lifestyle and heretical beliefs. He was a member of the Platonic Academy of Florence which was eventually driven underground by the Church.
8: Did the Last Supper Decay or was it Sabotaged?
The wall was irrigated by Dominican monks, scraped, and over-painted by the Inquisition to modify and erase heresy but the experts still recycle the myth of Leonardo’s failed fresco. We surveyed the north wall of the refectory and identified the motives and means of erased and modified images.
9: Documentation: Parchments and Paintings
From Leonardo’s notes and from contemporary copies of The Last Supper by assistants and colleagues we retrieve the artist’s intentions.
10: The Conservation of 1979-99: Leonardo’s intentions retrieved
In an intensive restoration project from 1979-99 Leonardo’s brushstrokes were reconstructed from the chemistry and from three contemporary copies oil on canvas.
PART THREE
11: Leonardo’s Self-Portrait: an Important Clue
The discovery in 2008 of a Leonardo portrait, be it autograph or copy, identifies Leonardo as the model for Thomas the doubter whose finger probed the side of Jesus.
12: Gender Fluidity in Leonardo’s Paintings and the Gnostic Gospels
The Gospel of Thomas was banned by the Church in the 4th century, but Leonardo portrayed its content in the 15th century just as the Book of Thomas was depicted on the Chartres window in the 13th century. The Gnostics did not regard sex as bi-polar which agreed with Leonardo’s aesthetic, anatomical, and personal experience.
13: The Man in the Iron Mask, Poussin Holds the Key
The suppressed secret transmitted down the ages by painters, the brother who was the true king, is also a recurring theme in literature.
14: The Custody of the Holy Land
What is, or was, the Priory of Sion’s “treasure to be returned to the State of Israel? And why did Leonardo paint the landscape of Mt Sion / Kidron Valley behind the figure of Jesus?
PART FOUR: Reinstating History
15: The Turin Shroud: Burial Cloth or the Ultimate Sfumato?
When a burial cloth of Jesus surfaced in 1494 was it the same relic as previously known? Or, as claimed in a book of 1994, was it another life-sized portrait of Jesus? Leonardo’s ultimate sfumato?
16: The Passover Plot
Why did Jesus convene his followers over the shrine of David? Dismiss the legend invented by Paul, a supporter of Rome who boasted that he did not learn from the disciples who were present. What really happened at the Last Supper?
17: The City of David
The lost secret was and is political. It is a power game connecting past and present. Jerusalem was (and is) the key to resolve the Middle East which is a global conflict. Rome burned down the Temple. The Church of Rome destroyed the Mother Church of Jerusalem. Mary was deemed a virgin; Peter displaced James; the popes usurped the Davidic or messianic line.
PART FIVE: THE THEORY OF ALL
18. City of Secrets
Cosima de’ Medici gathered books banned by the Church from the Islamic Middle East. Kabbalistic, Gnostic, and Hermetic wisdom re-entered Europe, ancient wisdom along with texts on philosophy and mathematics. We reveal Leonardo’s connections to closed fraternities.
19. Hidden Connections
The Last Supper is a universal message, pre-Christian and anti-Church. Leonardo painted pre-Catholic symbols which connect him to a Platonic and timeless wisdom of the planet as a living entity.
20. The Perennial Philosophy
The secret doctrine (the manipulation of divine powers) surfaced in Leonardo’s Florence with the patronage of Cosimo de Medici and flourished in the rulership over 1469-92 of his grandson, Lorenzo.
21. The Forgotten Future
Leonardo’s Last Supper is a cosmic drama that rises beyond any other of the many depictions of that scene. Those who do not learn from history are condemned to relive it. In our ignorance of the hidden connections we cannot see, as Leonardo, between science and religion, a divine spark capable of rising to the task, the continuation of the first act of Creation.
EPILOGUE
Leonardo’s Confession and Last Rites. Amboise, France, 1519.
A fictional and humorous flourish based on the textbook accounts of Leonardo’s death.