The Real di Vinci Code or The secret of Mona Lisa’s smile speaks to 21^st Century Physics.

 By Mary Ida Henrikson
Copyright Mary Ida Henrikson 2005

 The secret of Mona Lisa’s smile is less a mystery than her role symbolizing Quantum Physics.  What if Leonardo’s genius was not a patronizing nod at the 16^th century, but rather a 21^st century recognition of authentic genius?  Mona Lisa’s smile is simply the lower arc of Leonardo di Vinci’s astronomical drawing in the Leicester Codex, describing the earth’s rotation around the sun.  Her smile is not the whole painting; rather it is just one aspect describing a parallel universe.

Leonardo de Vinci was a scientist, a draftsman, a weapons designer, a reluctant painter, a writer and journalist who wrote backwards.  The art thing was part of the high Renaissance package.  His backward hand was not much of a secret, those who could read could immediately conclude “Oh, Leonardo is writing backwards again…get the mirror”. I think instead, the backward hand was symbolic of a parallel universe between which Leonardo could easily slip. His was a world turned up side down without the medieval weirdness, a universe without a vocabulary to describe itself.  But Leonardo could draw it; he could paint a picture of it.

Art comes first.  The artist gives us the concept of a thing.  The philosopher next describes the thing, creates a vocabulary for the concept and finally the scientist proves the thing. That Leonardo’s concept of a unified field theory could not be explained scientifically is understandable when one realizes the Scientific method did not exist in the 16^th century.  A 16^th century vocabulary could not describe a theory that a 21^st century vocabulary can barely explain. But Leonardo could draw so he drew the concept, he absorbed the concept naturally, artistically and he presented it fully as the Mona Lisa.

The barebones landscape behind the Mona Lisa is perhaps a secret passage into a parallel universe. The landscape surely existed as a forested place complete with river and bridge. As scientist Leonardo showed his geological skills transferring original horizontal layering into a tortured Italian mountain range with folding fire and ice and erosion (time and space) defining the aging process of the earth.  Upon this he superimposed a template of the earth itself revolving around the sun. Mona Lisa’s dazzling smile is the bottom arc of the sun drawn in the Codex Leicester, a heliocentric symbol for the enlightened age. (Distance from the Sun to the Earth and the size of the Moon. Cod. Leicester, Bill and Melinda Gates Collection).  Also note the minds symbolic placement, as the sun or light, on the high forehead of an aware Mona Lisa, who in fact may be mother earth.  Note again the placement of the revolving earth, tucked beneath an incredible bodice, over her heart.  The earth and the blood become symbolically connected not just in the 16^th century but also forever in a work that is an unexplainable object of pilgrimage.  This is a painting of the other earth, the thing we know and cannot know. 

 Leonardo di Vinci did not know the language of unified field theory, so he painted it over and over again.  Inside the Louvre, in Paris, St. John the Baptist has the same strange smile as the Mona Lisa, made stranger by its frontal exaggeration.  Saint Anne and the Virgin and Madonna of the Rocks, also have the same smile, the same lower arc of the circle that would be the sun from the Leicester Codex. All of these works painted as a beautiful mystery about which words had yet to be invented.  St. Anne and the Virgin and the Mona Lisa have bridges in the background. St. Anne has a tree in the middle ground, and in this work the abrupt transition from middle ground to background is obviously a change between one place in time and space to another. A bridge acting as a connective symbol further emphasizes the separation.  This abrupt transition is an artistic decision from the artist who invented sphumato: a system of gradual transition.

 Those who believe the Mona Lisa is a disguised self portrait should be made aware that all faces have the same position on the head and within the face is a universal “roadmap”.  One could super-impose any face over the Mona Lisa and achieve the same results as the self-portrait theory.  We could say she is us, our Mother, our Mother Earth, our flesh and blood and the landscape our bare bones.  She might be our other self, the one in a parallel universe. Leonardo lacked a logical linear vocabulary; instead he described quantum mechanics with conceptual brilliance. His visual language designed an explanation of what he intuitively knew to be the right way to view the world and the universe. 

 Leonardo could fly; he could rise above his ground and view the world from a different point of view. He drew Milan for example from the air.  His different point of view, the redraw of the Mona Lisa’s landscape, the joining of universal law with visual truth and his secret backward font are profound hints at quantum mechanics and a parallel universe.

Mary Ida Henrikson December 2005