An artist in New York has found a series of hidden images in Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece, the “Mona Lisa.” Artist Ron Piccirillo says that if you turn the painting sideways, you can see an outline of a lion, an ape, and a buffalo around Mona Lisa’s head, and a crocodile and snake coming out of her body. At this point Piccirillo began pouring over Da Vinci’s old journals, looking to find any textual hints corroborating his findings. The artist found text that mirrored his findings in the work, predicting the hidden existence of zoo animals in the work as well as providing a key to their symbolic meaning. The telltale journal passage reads, “Give her a leopard’s skin, because this creature kills the lion out of envy and by deceit,” and that’s when he made the connection to the lion’s head, hovering above her head. Piccirillo says he’s also uncovered hidden meanings in other renaissance paintings by Raphael, as well as in the Sistine Chapel. Art historians are skeptical.
