Da Vinci's Sacred Unveiling

The Last Supper (c. 1555-1562) by Juan de Juanes

The Last Supper (c. 1555-1562) by Juan de Juanes. A Spanish Renaissance work found at the Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain. The consecration of Jesus' broken body is epitomized in his holding a broken piece of bread above his head to be shared with his twelve apostles before his crucifixion. This event became one of the major sacraments of the church commemorating Jesus' death, burial, and resurrection enunciating God's salvation to humanity through Christ.

Sacred Unveiling

Beneath stilled hands a shattered silence lies,

its sudden truths loosed before startled eyes.
Divinity clothed in brush's shadows sealed,

to souls laid bare before love's pledged reveal.

'Ere whispered wounds flying swift as steeds,
on each face lay wonder, prayer, or appeal.
At bewildered commit of fleshly Bread and Cup,

soon bereft a God bowed to human crypt.

Within pigment, line, and hue, a secret sleeps,
of waking worlds crushed on breaking day.

Where hung no mere mortal posture beaten,
broke in heart and wounded, bloodied body.

Eve's sacred table brightly burns its sorrow,

its tender grace ne'er remit its living light.

No throne nor crown was cast that night,

but selfless love poured a bursting wineskin.

R.E. Slater

February 2, 2026

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved

Sacred Bloodlines

*The Holy Grail ‘neath ancient Roslin waits.
The blade and chalice guarding o’er Her gates.
Adorned in masters’ loving art, She lies.
She rests at last beneath the starry skies....

Deeper than crypt or cloistered stone,
a heavenly Grail awakens to flesh and bone.
Not cup nor crown, but breathing, mortal line,
entwining sacred blood soaked in human tears.

In Sophie’s eyes the ages softly shine,

living truths no tomb nor code can bind.

Of One abidingly gifted unceasing love,

in redemption's endless lineage of hope.

Neither vault nor veil can secret love's lore,

where unguarded hearts had fled their tombs.

Flown on sudden wings from crypt to cross,

born resurrection's covenanted renewal.

Sacred bloodlines flow on mercy's dare,

with every soul's broken, daily sacrifice.

Whose holy fires no darkness limits,

very immortals, living Sacraments!

R.E. Slater

February 2, 2026

*verse by Dan Brown, Da Vinci Code

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved

Leonardo da Vinci's, The Last Supper (c. 1495 - 1498)

Sacred Light

The broken bread ‘neath lamplit rafters lies,
with cup of sorrow mirroring all mortal cries.
No hidden sign painted upon the supper's seal,
but waking hearts laid bare to love's unveil.

Silent murmurs ran across disciples' breaths,

God's Word incarnate sharing life and death.
Whose kingdom births whenever souls do care,

to serve, heal, or bless, either friend or foe.

No cipher traced in pigment, gold, or frame,
yet worlds ignite at hearing Mercy’s name.
In Eucharist feast that gathers love and loss,

inviting Christ as Lamb and Living Cross.

R.E. Slater

February 2, 2026

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved

FRANCE-ART-MUSEUM-LOUVRE-JOCONDE

The Code Of Da Vinci

The Code of Da Vinci
Exists not in the pictures,
Or even in his works on walls...
It is in nature of his gravitation
To this, and may be strange reflection
Of his big and wonderful forever world.

The only smile on face of Jioconda,
And you feel there-here magic of the time,
When he did live...
But what are you feeling also?
She is alive, she is living girl
In real!

Lyudmila Purgina

Poetic Notes

*Jioconda (more commonly spelled Gioconda or La Gioconda) is another name for the famous painting, "Mona Lisa," created by Leonardo da Vinci in the early 16th century.

Lisa del Giocondo is the woman widely believed to be the subject of the portrait. She was the wife of a Florentine merchant named Francesco. "La Gioconda" literally means "the Giocondo lady."

The name also carries a poetic double meaning. In Italian, gioconda is related to gioia (joy), so it can suggest “the joyful one” or “the serene one.” This linguistic nuance subtly echoes the painting’s most famous feature - her enigmatic, gentle smile.

So when the poem speaks of “Jioconda,” it is invoking both the historical woman behind the portrait and the symbolic presence of the Mona Lisa herself - a figure who has come to embody mystery, interior life, and enduring artistic vitality.

Analysis

The poem proposes that the so-called “Code of Da Vinci” is not a hidden cipher embedded in symbols, diagrams, or secret meanings within Leonardo’s paintings. Instead, it relocates the idea of a “code” away from puzzles and toward a deeper existential source. The poet suggests that Leonardo’s true mystery lies not in what he concealed, but in how Leonardo related to the world itself.

This “code” is described as a kind of gravitational pull toward reality - a profound sensitivity to nature, humanity, time, and beauty. Leonardo’s genius arises from an exceptional openness to existence, a way of seeing that allows the fullness of the world to impress itself upon his inner life. His art, therefore, is not the origin of meaning but the reflection of a vast, attentive consciousness already alive within him.

The poem focuses especially on the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa as a point of contact between past and present. Rather than functioning as a riddle to be solved, the smile becomes a living bridge across time. Through it, viewers feel the presence of Leonardo’s era and, more importantly, the continuing vitality of his way of seeing.

The poem’s boldest claim is that the woman in the portrait is “alive.” This does not mean biological life, but a sustained sense of presence. The painting carries interiority, emotion, and being forward into the present moment. Great art, in this vision, does not merely depict life; it participates in life by transmitting vitality itself.

Taken together, the poem reframes Leonardo’s legacy as fundamentally relational rather than cryptic. His true “code” is a mode of attentiveness so deep that it allows reality to speak through him. What endures is not a secret message, but a living quality of perception that continues to awaken wonder centuries later.

Hans Zimmer - Chevaliers De Sangreal

(Live in Prague) (with better audio)

"Chevaliers De Sangreal" is one of the most celebrated performances from Hans Zimmer’s 2016 European tour, featuring a 72-piece ensemble including the Czech National Symphony Orchestra. Featured musicians are world-class soloists like violinist Rusanda Panfili and cellist Tina Guo. This powerful and emotionally stirring orchestral composition was originally written for The Da Vinci Code soundtrack. It’s one of the climactic themes of the film, typically associated with the moment of revelation and discovery near the story’s end.

In performance, especially in the Live in Prague recording, the piece unfolds as a gradual musical ascent: it begins with soft, sustained tones and simple motifs, then builds steadily through layered strings, brass, and often choral voices. This creates a sense of growing intensity and transcendence - a musical journey from quiet mystery toward triumphant resolution.

The overall mood of the piece is epic, reflective, and uplifting. It balances moments of contemplative calm with dramatic surges of sound, giving listeners both a meditative quality and a cinematic sense of grandeur. This dynamic arc is part of why the piece resonates deeply with audiences and is frequently described as “goosebump-inducing.”

The live setting in Prague adds extra energy and richness because the acoustics of a full orchestra and possible choir enhance the emotional impact. You hear a vivid, resonant performance that feels both majestic and intimate - an experience that mirrors the dramatic scope of the original film score.

In short, Chevaliers De Sangreal is an orchestral emotional climax: serene at first and then soaring into a powerful, almost ecstatic statement of musical resolution and beauty. 

The Da Vinci Code is a 2003 thriller novel by Dan Brown that follows Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon as he investigates a murder at the Louvre, uncovering a conspiracy involving secrets about Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene hidden in Leonardo da Vinci's art, leading to a race against a shadowy organization to reveal a historical truth. The book became a massive bestseller, sparking debate over its historical and religious claims, and was adapted into a major film.

Kathleen L. Housley - The Painting of Water

The Painting of Water

by Kathleen L. Housley



“I can give perfect satisfaction...

in guiding water from one place to another.”

-Leonardo da Vinci*

*While Leonardo da Vinci was painting the Mona Lisa, he was working with Niccolò Machiavelli as a hydraulic engineer (in Italian, maestro di acque) on plans to divert the Arno River with the goal of making Florence into a seaport. The recent discovery of the New World by Columbus and the subsequent voyages by the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci heightened the project’s importance. Leonardo completed extensive aerial drawings and designed an earth-moving machine. However, the engineer hired to do the job radically changed the design, decreasing the depth of the canal from 30 to 14 feet. In 1504, the project was abandoned when a flood collapsed the walls and 80 soldiers drowned.



The Painting of Water

I.

Even in his dreams there are rivers,
murmuring to the Maestro of Water
to study the vortices of rapids,
the swirling formation of eddies,
to sketch the velocity of floods
roaring down the Tuscan hills,
comparing their hydraulic power
to the dark force of blood coursing
through narrow arterial tunnels,
to draw as well the slow process
of streambed sedimentation similar
to the silting up of veins in old age,
revealed to him by covert dissection
and rigorous analyses as clandestine
as his ideas of evolutionary change.

He wakes with a start, inundated
by the torrent of too many ideas
gushing from the headwaters
of his brain, and before sunlight
glints on the Adriatic and suffuses
pink the Apennines’ eastern slopes,
he jumps from his bed and lets loose
a little rivulet of sepia ink across
the flood plain of an empty page:
here winding into a design for wings,
there looping into a rotating bridge,
before diverting to vacant space
near the paper’s edge where it turns
into a cataract of mirror-imaged words
about shell fossils embedded in cliffs
and geological time far more vast
than Biblical reckoning—Noah’s flood
and crowded ark being replaced
by repeated submergences separated
by the slow uplift of stratified rock.

II.

Given the super-saturation of his mind,
how can he paint her young anatomy
other than as liquid panorama?
Posing for him now, La Gioconda flows,
the ripples in her sleeves like standing waves
reflecting gold, the curlicues of her hair
under a diaphanous veil identical
to swirls of spray at a waterfall’s base.
Had there been no expectation by patrons
that a portrait be painted skin-side-out,
he would be delighted to draw her ribs
arching beneath the pleats of her dress,
the spreading delta of arteries and veins
within her hands, the pulse in her wrist
palpable beneath the hairs of his brush,
whispering of a hidden riparian system
more complex than that of the Arno
which he has recently surveyed,
drawing a detailed bird’s-eye view
as part of a scheme to divert the river,
making his beloved city of Florence,
fifty miles inland, into a prosperous port,
all of which he intends to include
in the background, underpainted blue,
along with jagged peaks, green valleys,
a stone viaduct crossing a stream,
a sinuous road and a bay leading
in the distance to a New World
beckoning in a warm golden haze,
light and shade blending like sea foam,
so that while he seems to portray
a beautiful woman, as he touches
her outlined lips with the brush’s tip,
he siphons into her ineffable smile
the confluence of her bloodstream
and the Earth’s primordial waters,
upwelling with his own heart’s awe
into a landscape beyond the curve of time.

III.

Nearly finished,
he leaves a digit
in her left hand
incomplete,
as if he fears
a final stroke
will stop up
all of nature,
defying
the laws of motion
and stilling
the Prime Mover
who of necessity
must move
or all the world
be dead.
Dynamics
demands that
he unsettle
equilibrium;
one undone
finger,
and her heart
pumps.


Kathleen L. Housley, 2011



About the Author

Making her home in Connecticut, Kathleen L. Housley graduated from Upsala College and holds a Masters from Wesleyan University. Her research and writing interests display a faithful humanism that is both deep and wide, integrating such diverse fields of inquiry as 19th-century suffragism, abolitionism, and Bible translation, the history of art and art collecting in the Modern period, cosmology, anthropology, and the material sciences—all in addition to theology and poetry. Her latest three books are Black Sand: The History of Titanium (2007); a book of poetry, Firmament (2008); and Keys to the Kingdom: Reflections on Music and the Mind (2010), a collection of meditations on the transformative power of music and friendship. Her work has appeared in the journals Image, Isotope, The Christian Century, and Ars Medica, and her poem “A Psalm for a New Human Species” previously appeared on the BioLogos website, in addition to the first of her Leonardo poems, “The Painting of Wings.”

Kathleen L. Housley - The Painting of Wings

The Painting of Wings

by Kathleen L. Housley

“The bird is an instrument functioning
according to mathematical laws,
and man has the power to reproduce
an instrument like this with all its movements.”

- Leonardo da Vinci*

*The opening quote is from the Codex Atlanticus. The quote “tomorrow morning I shall make the strap and the attempt,” is dated January 2, 1496. In his notebooks, Leonardo wrote that the attempt should be made over a lake with a wineskin for a life preserver. He also wrote that destruction could occur if “the machine breaks” or “turns edgewise.” There is no record of whether the attempt actually took place. The Annunciation was probably painted around 1472 when Leonardo was still in Verrocchio’s workshop. There is disagreement as to whether he painted it entirely, but there is agreement that he painted the angel.

The Painting of Wings

I.

More like copious field notes than paintings,
Leonardo finishes few, and even those he considers
works in progress that stopped progressing,
like lava that spewed from a fiery vent
then congealed into a cold parody of motion.
Regretfully, he recalls his half-fledged angel,
painted years before careful observation
and anatomical sketches of hawks and swifts
riding effortlessly on rivers of wind
revealed to him that flight is achieved
by force of air, not physical strength.
Weighed down by short muscular wings
that jut from his scapula, the angel
would have been forced to deliver
the annunciation message on foot,
trudging across a landscape, lovely yet awry,
to kneel at last before the Virgin who reads
from an out-of-perspective Bible. All wrong.

II.

Now he prepares to make amends,
not with paint but with real wings
made with reed bones and linen skin,
designed to finesse the air instead of
pommeling it into submission,
more like those of a bat than a bird.
He jots in his notebook “tomorrow morning
I shall make the strap and the attempt.”
Yet he hesitates, sharing with Daedalus
a concern for catastrophic system failure,
which leads him to decide against jumping
off the roof of the Corte Vecchia,
choosing instead to launch from a cliff
beside a lake, wrapped in soft chamois
to protect his bones, with an empty wineskin
tied securely around his waist
in case the whole thing come unglued
and he plummet, like Icarus, from the sky.

III.

Leonardo deems it the boy’s own fault
for not paying attention to his father’s warnings
about the narrow operating parameters
and material limitations of wings,
specifically the low melting point of beeswax
if he should fly too near the sun,
and the weight of water on the feathers
if he should fly too near the waves.
But Daedalus had to share some of the blame
for perceiving of wings as nothing more
than a practical means of escape,
impervious to the joyous uprush of blue.

IV.

Darkness descends, and Leonardo recalls
his childhood dream of a hawk hovering
over his cradle, while in the refectory,
the dim glow from a lamp illumines
the scaffolding before The Last Supper,
and in his workshop candlelight flickers
on the clay model of a great horse,
both awaiting his hands and mind
to reach perfection, heightening his fears
that he may have miscalculated
the mathematical laws of flight,
and that the morning’s planned attempt
should be postponed until he is sure
the sum does not equal his own death.

V.

As he falls asleep, he thinks he hears
the ominous vibration of wing struts.
He centers his weight, struggling
not to turn edgewise to the wind,
until all at once, in equilibrium,
he glides on the streams of the sky
before beginning a spiral descent,
landing at last by an earth-bound angel
who listens raptly to a woman reading aloud
from the Codex on the Flight of Birds.


Kathleen L. Housley, 2011



About the Author

Making her home in Connecticut, Kathleen L. Housley graduated from Upsala College and holds a Masters from Wesleyan University. Her research and writing interests display a faithful humanism that is both deep and wide, integrating such diverse fields of inquiry as 19th-century suffragism, abolitionism, and Bible translation, the history of art and art collecting in the Modern period, cosmology, anthropology, and the material sciences—all in addition to theology and poetry. Her latest three books are Black Sand: The History of Titanium (2007); a book of poetry, Firmament (2008); and Keys to the Kingdom: Reflections on Music and the Mind (2010), a collection of meditations on the transformative power of music and friendship. Her work has appeared in the journals Image, Isotope, The Christian Century, and Ars Medica, and her poem “A Psalm for a New Human Species” previously appeared on the BioLogos website.