Los Angeles, CA - Sept. 16, 2011
The greatest secret in art history was declared by Scott Lund in Rome on the date 9/10/11. It was revealed to be an ingenious optical trick that Leonardo da Vinci used to transform the viewer of the Mona Lisa into the pagan Sun god Janus who looks in opposite directions simultaneously.The Los Angeles investigative writer briefly addressed a crowd of people gathered near the ancient Colosseum, then led them to the tune of a bagpiper across the Tiber river to the top of the Janiculum hill named after the two-faced Sun god. There he identified the Tempietto of Bramante as the site where Leonardo had his vision for the world's most famous work of art. Lund states that the Mona Lisa is a personification of the elegant circular chapel built by Donato Bramante at the presumed location of the mythical citadel occupied by Janus at the beginning of Italian civilization.
“The Mona Lisa's landscape is not a fantasy, but a precise survey map of Rome and its vicinity. The survey cleverly defines the two extremes of religion, marking the center of Christianity on the right side, and the center of paganism on the left. The dome of St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican is one end of the survey, and the site of the cult practices of the goddess Diana at Lake Nemi is the other. A line between the two endpoints, 29.5 km apart, intersects the Tempietto of Bramante,” says Lund.
“Lake Nemi was the cradle of European witchcraft, and its location on the Mona Lisa was dangerously heretical during the Renaissance period. Using the pagan god Janus as the theme for the painting also implied Leonardo's heretical conviction that the sun was the center of the Universe,” he says.
In his book the “Mona Lisa Code,” Lund identifies the central figure of the Mona Lisa as a single soul shared between an expectant mother and her unborn male child. The dualistic theme of Janus is symbolized by the partial pillars on either side of the painting, and the god is also identified by the code words ANIMA SOL, which is a secret anagram for the name Mona Lisa, meaning “Soul/Sun god” in Latin.
“What tied the soul and the sun together for Leonardo is that he believed the sun to be the source for the vital force of the soul,” says Lund, “Leonardo also believed that all images, including the Mona Lisa, were the result of the sun being projected onto the soul at the back of the eye.”
“Leonardo was extremely logical, and the method of his genius is that he always sought out logical extremes. The opposite faces of Janus uniquely portrayed the metaphor of a land survey, which requires the connection of a straight line between two points,” says Lund.
According to Lund, Leonardo worked with Bramante at the court of Milan until 1499 when an invading French army sent their Sforza patron fleeing the city. The two friends then sought safety and new opportunities in Rome, which was preparing for its Grand Jubilee of 1500. The Mona Lisa was begun in conjunction with the groundbreaking of Bramante's Tempietto in 1502, at a time when Leonardo was known to have been in Rome. Their complementary projects were intended to symbolize the religious doctrine of the “two faces of the soul.”
Lund says that the radical stereoscopic illusion Leonardo crafted into the Mona Lisa exceeds the imagination of any Hollywood movie script writer. Billions of people have viewed the painting without suspecting the ingenious Janus-faced perspective that the grand master had placed them in.
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