Don’t know about you, but I now have Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio coming out of my ears.
Quite literally, I hasten to add. The other day I pulled out “The Supper At Emmaus” from my left auditory canal. And my ENT specialist tells me there’s still a “St Jerome” lodged somewhere between my malleus, stapes and semi-circular canals. (He recommends beheading as a cure, but I’ve been advised to seek out a second opinion.)
If all this wasn’t bad enough, it seems the entire country is having Caravaggio forced down its every orifice, too. Just look at what we’re coming to: plays, movies, operas, antics, theatrics, histrionics, exhibitions, cons, controversies, conspiracies, Caravaggio workshops, Caravaggio copybooks, Caravaggio car-stickers, Caravaggio this, Caravaggio that, Caravaggio the other... I imagine it’s only a matter of time before we entrench Caravaggio into the Constitution, and pelt MPs with fake little plastic Caravaggio foetuses on their way into parliament.
I mean honestly. Must we make a fetish out of absolutely everything?

But this week it was another famous Italian artist who caught my eye. It seems that five centuries before Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway To Heaven” or The Beatles’ “Revolution No. 9”, the concept of subliminal musical recordings, hidden within other artistic forms, was pioneered by a certain Leonardo da Vinci while he wasn’t too busy inventing helicopters and submarines.
That’s right. It’s not enough that good old Leonardo was a direct offshoot of the secret union of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalen, the last known Keeper of the Mysteries, an unofficial Knight of the Temple of Solomon, and a passing half-decent artist and inventor in his own right. No, he had to be more than all these things. He also had to be the composer of a “secret” piece of music, cunningly disguised as a painting called “The Last Supper”, and which would lie undiscovered for 500 years until a certain computer technician by the name of Giovanni Maria Pala happened to remark: doesn’t the tablecloth look just like the staff of a musical score?

And so, superimposing an imaginary score-sheet onto the painting, Pala plotted onto each bar a number of strategic objects placed on and around the table, including plates, cups, saucers, a couple of Apostolic hands, and one or two loaves of bread.
Imagining these things to be musical notes – a perfectly natural and normal thing to imagine, I suppose – the result was a short piece of music, supposedly composed by Leonardo himself, which sounds for all the world like a cat being bludgeoned to death with a harpsichord. (You can hear it for yourselves somewhere on the abcnews.com website.)

This little news item forcefully reminded me of the time when I had accidentally stumbled upon an earth-shattering scientific discovery all of my own. It happened in a bar in Rabat, where I consumed numerous saucers full of roasted, unsalted karawett, leaving in the process an intricate mosaic of crumbs and bits of shattered peanut shell all over the table surface. Gazing upon the resulting mess afterwards, I realised that – if you pretended that 90 per cent of the crumbs didn’t exist, and joined up the remaining 10 per cent with imaginary lines – what emerged was the picture of an evolutionary genealogical family tree, proving conclusively that “Nazzjonalisti” and “Laburisti” are two primate species which descended from a common ancestor – “homo partiggianus leccaculis mexxejus” – with the “missing link” being the intelligence, imagination and general sense of perspective commonly associated with their distant relatives, “homo sapiens sapiens”.
Sadly, however, all evidence of my discovery was promptly destroyed by a passing waiter before I had the chance to contact the National Enquirer.

But back to Da Vinci. Unlike my own anthropological efforts, Pala’s revelation this week seems to actually have been taken seriously. Already, armies of Leonardo buffs the world over are tearing into the great Italian inventor’s opus in the hope of unearthing some undiscovered symphony, opera, heavy metal anthem or, who knows? Perhaps the occasional example of early Florentine gangsta rap. Next thing we know, someone will decipher the lyrics of “Like A Virgin” in Leonardo’s “Madonna of the Rocks”. Or was that “Madonna of the Rock N Roll”?
Anyhow: all very harmless fun, but what I really want to know is this: If Leonardo da Vinci composed a piece of music – which we all now he was perfectly capable of doing – why on earth would he choose such an unlikely way of recording it for posterity? Why not just write it on a score sheet like everybody else? After all, it is meant to be a hymn… hardly the type of thing that would land him in an Inquisition dungeon. Could it be that the music itself was so embarrassing that he felt the need to cover his tracks? Or is it simply because Leonardo Da Vinci actually composed nothing of the kind, and that the above “discovery” is nothing but the flight of fancy of a computer whiz kid who’s evidently read too much Dan Brown?

I somehow suspect the latter, and this is why. Taking a closer look at Pala’s “discovery”, a certain detail leaps to the eye. One of the items which (according to the theory) also doubles up as a musical note, is a loaf of bread sitting right next to a cup in front of the controversial figure who may or may not be St John. But this only raises the question: why does that loaf of bread in particular qualify as a musical note… but not the cup? Or for that matter, “St John’s” middle finger?
Ah, you see, because had it been the cup or the finger instead of the loaf, the musical score would have been slightly different. With a note out of place, the resulting piece of music would have been off-key… and it is simply impossible to even entertain the notion that a great genius of the calibre of Leonardo would have written anything but a note-perfect masterpiece.
Therefore, it had to have been the loaf, not the cup or the finger, to be a musical note. Q.E.D.

Oh dear. I suppose there’s very little purpose in pointing out the rather simple fallacy in the above logic, but I’ll do it all the same.
This argument only makes sense if you also accept the overall basic premise: i.e., that the Last Supper does indeed represent an encoded piece of music. If, like me, you don’t, then the entire reasoning crumbles instantly. But even if you are taken in by this sort of “trompe l’oreille”, you will surely realise that a basic premise of any argument cannot be used as proof of the same argument to begin with.
There are any amount of examples – mostly from religion, which seems to be prone to this sort of thing – but perhaps the clearest is the official Catholic doctrine on Purgatory. According to this unique line of argument, the reason Catholics believe in Purgatory is because, if Purgatory didn’t exist, there would be no point in praying for the souls of the dead. (Yes, but… who ever said there was any point?)
Another famous example involves the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady… which of course must be true, because if Our Lady wasn’t immaculately conceived, then how could someone as fussy as God possibly choose a woman sullied by original sin to bear His only son and heir? (Yes, but… Oh, never mind.)

In the end, however, the real problem with this latest “Da Vinci con” is not just that the logic is flawed. It’s that the scientific method is skewed.
Truth be told, there is no reason to suppose that The Last Supper is also a piece of music, other than the fact that Giovanni Maria Pala has looked for precisely such a musical score, and claims to have found one. But recognisable patterns can always be discerned in any random occurrence of unrelated items. Just as I caught a fleeting glimpse of the origins of the typical Maltese political nutcase in a pile of peanut shells, so too can anyone identify any pattern in any assortment of unlikely objects, simply by allowing one’s brain to do what it does best: make order out of chaos.
Admittedly, the resulting order the brain invariably manages to contrive is intriguing and often seductive in its own right. But that doesn’t make it real.
It is our natural difficulty in distinguishing between these two unrelated factors – that which is desirable, and that which is real – which allows an ever-growing army of cranks, kooks and con-artists to keep getting away with absurdity.