Giovanni Maria Pala does not want in to the Da Vinci Code Furor. He's seen what fiction does to art and it scares him. What's next, he wonders, a Savannah Landscape lurking within the chaos of Jackson Pollock drippings? So Giovanni was molto suspicious when he heard that researchers believed that Da Vinci had hidden a musical composition in his mural of the Last Supper. So in 2003 the 45 year old Eyetie Musician started studying the painting.

First he looked for all elements in the work which might be 'Bearers of Meaning' and therefore vehicles for symbols - especially Christian Symbols. The Musical Composition, he figured, would have to hide in plain site and it would have to be cached behind things with salience - things that draw the mind to them. Hmm . . . the eyetie pondered . . . monkeys are wired to grok faces and hands . . . but the faces in the painting are all on the same narrow plane - not enough room to hide a Musical Staff. So look at the hands. Hands in art are Mudra-like; they are tools for expression. Hindu or Jesusifier, hands were always saying something in art. What else? Well, he figured - oozing logic and reason, like Spinoza on 'shrooms - the Table is such a part of the composition, and such a part of Christian Iconography where the Table is the Altar - that it would be the natural plane to anchor the Staff - its surface serving as the bottom line of the Musical Tablature. So those loaves of bread would be notes too, just like the hands.

So he drew the 5 lines of the Musical Staff across the painting from the fore-edge of the table to the tops of the highest held hand in the work. Now he could put the "notes" on the staff where the hands and loaves were but how could he judge the note's duration? But what he knew about music, art, and Da Vinci pointed the way: Harmony, which in art can be symmetry, is the basis of tone and rhythm. Da Vinci was not just a great Artist but he was also a Musician - he played the Lyre and was a designer of several other musical instruments. Da Vinci was also a pathological riddler. He created and left puzzles and riddles, koans and symbols all over his work as well as his life. So Giovanni knew that the Maestro left the notes' beat anamorphically spread out over the composition.

When he was finished decoding Pala had a 40 second hymn which he describes as a "Requiem." Perhaps a dirge to punctuate the Passion of Christ. He says the music is Bach-like and that it sounds best played on a large pipe organ. The Tempo is languid and the effect is highly emotional as you hear it and face the painting - knowing what the scene depicts, and what it means in the Hermetics of the Church. Is there, perhaps, a Diabolus lurking? Skippy mused - and then he had this vision of assigning every vertex/node of the Necker Cube - in both its forms - a note on a staff whose 5 lines define the top and bottom lines of both species and then playing them in a Crab Canon back and forth as they Flipped. I bet the Devil's in there.

Use your Back Button on your Browser