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I think you're still mising the cigar point. Once again, I wasn't addressing your interpretations on the painting, but rather a point someone else made about author's intentions on the whole.

Movie Nerd wrote:I think you're still mising the cigar point. Once again, I wasn't addressing your interpretations on the painting, but rather a point someone else made about author's intentions on the whole.

Well thank you for caveating your point. Yes there are examples where people make up interpretations that are not intended by the author, but that is not the case here. Given that at least three or four creationists in this thread have made a similar point in providing airheaded input as a direct critique here, it is important to clarify that uncertainty regarding some interpretation does not mean all interpretation is uncertain.

I discussed the cigar example as it is relevant to this thread, which is as a critique of the suggestion that Leonardo used Christ and the apostles as symbols of observable nature and time.

Lets imagine we were talking about Peter, and we had no evidence that Rubens anywhere stated this painting was of Saint Peter

The weight of tradition is so strong, and the political meaning of the keys is so powerful, that if anyone said 'sometime keys are just keys' as a way to argue this might not be Peter they would just get laughed at. Of course the symbol is direct and clear.

The difference with the visible stars is that they sit under a weight of cultural hostility in our society, as the Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing ably explains in her wonderful book Shikasta. People are conditioned to be incapable of looking up at the sky, as the Bible and Leonardo enjoin us to do. If people could actually look carefully, they would see the code I describe in the sky and the painting. It is really very simple.

What evidence would you actually accept as falsifying this hypothesis of yours, Robert?

I'm guessing nothing would change your mind short of Leonardo rising from his grave to tell you, "Guess what? I was commissioned to paint a portrait of the Last Supper - and that's all I really did"

But lets hear it from you.

Robert wrote:

he alignment of Leonardo's work with Hermetic philosophy is abundant and compelling. Leonardo was a leader of the intellectual scene in Florence where the major rediscovery of Hermetic texts occurred in his life time. He explicitly states in his extant writings “Hermes the Philosopher”

Leonardo was not part of the public intellectual scene.
Toward the end of his career, he came forward to speak on the prominence of the artist. To my knowledge, there is no documentation of LDV publicly or privately espousing "hermetic PHILOSOPHY"
Show me evidence that I am wrong, please.

I'm honestly confused here, Robert.
Are you saying Leonardo da Vinci wrote a work titled "Hermes the Philosopher"?

.

ant wrote:What evidence would you actually accept as falsifying this hypothesis of yours, Robert?

Similar methods as used to attempt to falsify any scientific hypothesis, such as the claim that Jupiter has moons.

In this case the correlation is statistical. We have a code that can be presented symbolically as __/ Vo Π Y ? <> X ζ Д Δ Γ Λ

This code appears in the star path of the sun as the shapes of the constellations, and is embedded in The Last Supper from right to left in the stances of the twelve apostles, which also are in four groups of three as shown, reflecting how these star maps indicate the seasons of the year.

There is abundant motive and opportunity for Leonardo to have used this data with conscious and deliberate intent, given his interests in science and religion, and to conceal it.

Statistical analysis such as the difficulty of cracking complex codes indicates effectively zero probability that this correlation is coincidence.

ant wrote:Robert wrote:

he alignment of Leonardo's work with Hermetic philosophy is abundant and compelling. Leonardo was a leader of the intellectual scene in Florence where the major rediscovery of Hermetic texts occurred in his life time. He explicitly states in his extant writings “Hermes the Philosopher”

Leonardo was not part of the public intellectual scene.
Toward the end of his career, he came forward to speak on the prominence of the artist. To my knowledge, there is no documentation of LDV publicly or privately espousing "hermetic PHILOSOPHY"
Show me evidence that I am wrong, please. I'm honestly confused here, Robert. Are you saying Leonardo da Vinci wrote a work titled "Hermes the Philosopher"?

Leonardo's extant Notebooks, which are just a portion of his total writings, are available online at ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gu ... ldv209.txt

Statement 1425 is "Hermes the philosopher."

Earlier in this thread I went through a range of other hermetic comments in Leonardo's Notebooks.

Paragraph 929 is particularly relevant to demonstrate Leonardo's scientific commitment the Hermetic principle As Above So Below

Leonardo Da Vinci wrote:929: By the ancients man has been called the world in miniature; and certainly this name is well bestowed, because, inasmuch as man is composed of earth, water, air and fire, his body resembles that of the earth; and as man has in him bones the supports and framework of his flesh, the world has its rocks the supports of the earth; as man has in him a pool of blood in which the lungs rise and fall in breathing, so the body of the earth has its ocean tide which likewise rises and falls every six hours, as if the world breathed; as in that pool of blood veins have their origin, which ramify all over the human body, so likewise the ocean sea fills the body of the earth with infinite springs of water. The body of the earth lacks sinews and this is, because the sinews are made expressely for movements and, the world being perpetually stable, no movement takes place, and no movement taking place, muscles are not necessary. --But in all other points they are much alike.

The Last Supper depicts Christ and the twelve apostles as "the world in miniature" exactly in line with this principle explained by Leonardo himself.

Paragraph 1162 is also supremely decisive to show how this interpretation of The Last Supper aligns directly to Leonardo's stated intent to present man as an image of the world or cosmos, and to understand human life within the natural framework of time.

Leonardo Da Vinci wrote:1162: the man who with constant longing awaits with joy each new spring time, each new summer, each new month and new year--deeming that the things he longs for are ever too late in coming--does not perceive that he is longing for his own destruction. But this desire is the very quintessence, the spirit of the elements, which finding itself imprisoned with the soul is ever longing to return from the human body to its giver. And you must know that this same longing is that quintessence, inseparable from nature, and that man is the image of the world.

Thank you for your responses. I appreciate your not being condescending or adding any ad homs.

I am going to invoke the principle of charity here and do my best to consider what youve written in these last two posts.
Honestly speaking, there is something I thought about on my own that you have not mentioned that actually gave me a moment of pause about all this.

Ill not shoot from the hip.
Ill return to this a bit later.

Ant, you worry me. On another thread discussing evolution, you clearly went out on the attack, and here you say you appreciate others not giving you the same treatment. That worries me.

To Robert. I have been looking at your posts, and I wouldn't say i disagree with you. You seem to have your arguments in order. Once again, my comments on the cigar had nothing to do with that. I was merely making a point that readers and viewers of piece of are can't always make presuppositions on an author's intentions. I made no mention of Da Vinci's painting. I was speaking broadly about all pieces of art.

Movie Nerd wrote:Ant, you worry me. On another thread discussing evolution, you clearly went out on the attck, and here you say you appreciate others not giving you the same treatment. That worries me.

To Robert. I have been looking at your posts, and I wouldn't say i disagree with you. You seem to have your arguments in order. Once again, my comments on the cigar had nothing to do with that. I was merely making a point that readers and viewers of piece of are can't always make presuppositions on an author's intentions. I made no mention of Da Vinci's painting. I was speaking broadly about all pieces of art.

Okay, but there are protocols regarding the logic of conversation. Some of the posts in the discussion chain that you responded to were directly attacking my views, and your comments were aligned to that critique, even though you did not endorse it, or perhaps even notice it. Readers cannot tell what is in your mind when you raise an image as cryptic as Freudian cigar symbolism. It is good to tease out what the intent may be, and how it is relevant or not to the topic at hand.

Best not to try to make sense of ant. He/she is a one-off, with little compunction regarding consistency.