Neglected portrait might be new Da Vinci Code painting

PanARMENIAN.Net - It hung on the wall of a Perthshire doctor’s home for more than 30 years and was even splashed with paint by the owner while decorating, Scotsman.com said.

But a new book this month will claim the portrait of a Madonna and Child is a 500-year-old masterpiece by Leonardo Da Vinci that also contains clues to a hidden heresy. For years, Fiona McLaren ignored the old painting, which was a gift to her father from a grateful patient, but after embarking on a painstaking analysis of the portrait, she now believes it to be a final, unfinished painting by the Italian Old Master.

Her book, Da Vinci’s Last Commission: The Most Sensational Detective Story In The History Of Art, is being published to coincide with the Edinburgh International Book Festival, which starts next week. According to McLaren, the painting also contains clues indicating that Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code was actually based on historical truth not just the inventive fiction that Jesus Christ had a love affair with Mary Magdalene and their relationship produced children.

She argues that the painting was commissioned by King Francis I of France and is not a painting of the Madonna and Child but of Mary Magdalene cradling either Jesus as an infant or Jesus’s own child.

As in Brown’s best-selling novel, McLaren claims that the truth of Jesus’s relationship with Mary Magdalene has been concealed by the Catholic Church, which feared the descendants of Jesus would have a greater claim on ruling the Church than the Pope as the successor of St Peter.

In Brown’s book, the Holy Grail is revealed not as an artefact but as the secret that Jesus had established a bloodline that had survived to the present day. McLaren says her assertion that the painter of the Mona Lisa also worked on her painting is backed by a former head of the Christie’s auction house in Scotland. She also says that a document attached to the back of the painting and its frame is part of a Papal Bull, a form of letter issued by Popes over the centuries.

However, on her Facebook page, McLaren says: “It [the book] centres around the beguiling 16th-century portrait of a Madonna and Child, which has a mysterious Papal Bull attached to the back. It was the starting gun to my quest to discover what she, and other artefacts which travelled with her, were conspiring to tell.”