The Secret Supper: A Novel

by Javier Sierra Narrated by Simon Jones

Overview

This instant New York Times bestseller reveals the secrets embedded in Leonardo Da Vinci's best-known Christian piece The Last Supper.

Milan, 1497: Leonardo is completing The Last Supper. Pope Alexander VI is determined to execute him after realizing that the painting contains clues to a baffling-and blasphemous-message that he is driven to decode. The Holy Grail and the Eucharistic Bread are missing, there is no meat on the table, and the apostles, shockingly, are portraits of well-known heretics-and none of them are depicted with halos. And why has the artist painted himself into the scene with his back turned toward Jesus? The clues to Leonardo's greatest puzzle are right before your eyes...

Tightly paced and atmospheric, The Secret Supper is a dazzling historical thriller with a unique vision of both Leonardo da Vinci's genius and his masterpiece-which you will never look at in the same way again.

Editorial Reviews

In this clever fiction, the hidden codes of Leonardo da Vinci raise temperatures among his contemporaries. Late in the 15th century, a series of cryptic, anonymous missives alert church officials to the possibility that subversive messages might be concealed in the artistry of The Last Supper. Dispatched to Milan to investigate, Father Agostino Leyre begins an act of aesthetic and historic decoding that takes us to the final line of the last page.

Kirkus Reviews

No mere Da Vinci Code redux, this Spanish bestseller fuses an ecclesiastical whodunit with an A-Z guide to Neoplatonist philosophy and Renaissance symbology. Leonardo's masterwork The Last Supper has become the 15th century's Zapruder film, obsessively scrutinized for clues to conspiracies. Now Sierra (La Dama Azul, 2005, etc.) produces a corker: His Da Vinci is a Cathar, member of a heretical sect espousing a mystical Christianity. And, as Father Agostino, Sierra's clerical super-sleuth, detects, the world's most famous fresco drips with cryptic Cathar propaganda. Isn't that Leonardo himself, after all, at the left of the Passover table, chatting up Plato? Don't the 12 apostles resonate with astrological and numerological significance? And isn't there a secret message their gestures and names spell out? Maybe this "discovery" is balderdash, but it's fascinating fun. We meet Marsilio Ficino, rescuer of esoteric Egyptian wisdom, Savonarola, so shocked by Botticelli's paganism that he convinces that fine painter to trash his brush, Lorenzo the Magnificent, ultra-Renaissance Man-all real-life titans portrayed with a storyteller's zest for anecdote. Sierra's breakneck plotting provides the novel's juice, but its satisfying aftertaste comes from its erudite explaining of the art of the symbol: The last thing the quattrocento masters intended was to paint just "pretty pictures." Instead, they aimed at allegory, constructing visual narratives rich in coded signs and wonders, an achievement long celebrated by historians and Jungians alike. In ushering general readers into that numinous realm, the author ensures that they'll never again rush through a museum. Sierra is a more sophisticated writerthan Dan Brown, and he offers fresh perspective on the Renaissance mind.

From the Publisher

"Sierra's narrative moves smoothly, fluidly...[and makes] art history palatable and exciting." — Los Angeles Times

"A fascinating yarn and very well told.... Speaks volumes about Leonardo's mastery with a brush." — San Francisco Chronicle

"For fans of religious conspiracy and reinterpretations of religious history." — The Washington Post

"Offers a new way of interpreting The Last Supper...[and] a fresh contribution to the da Vinci industry." — Publishers Weekly

"A most satisfying entertainment....The monastic life has not been depicted as vividly by any novelist since Umberto Eco's bestselling Name of the Rose." — Daily News (New York)

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170538867
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	03/21/2006
Edition description:	Unabridged

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