What was Leonardo hinting at with John the Baptist?

originally posted by: eManym
Why did DaVinci portray the protagonists of the Bible as feminine looking males?

Because that was the popular art style of the time.
Kind of like how many middle eastern religious figures in that time period were depicted as 'white' and not Jewish or Arabic or whatever, because everyone was doing it and it was popular.

Not much different from modern humans having to rip off anything that is popular instead of attempting to create anything unique and original.

Pop-Culture, trends, fads and copy catting aren't new things to mankind. All that has really changed is the tech we have, the majority of people today aren't that different from most humans from any time period.

originally posted by: AtomicKangaroo
IF the grail is completely fictional what does it say about any claims attached to it?

I took a college course from one of the top Grail researchers in the world, and she was pretty convinced that it was basically a literary device that was meant to help pagans transition from their old folk tales to Christianity. Some of the details come from older stories, but were later simply incorporated into the general mythology.

Superman isn't real either, but most of us can recite dozens of "facts" about him, which are also literary devices.

a reply to: erosphanespriapus

Hi Eros--

You raise an interesting point about the solar-connexion between the Lucan character portrayals of 'Jesus' and 'John' (i.e. R. Yehoshua bar Yosef the Galilean and R. Yohanon bar Zecharaiah) in the third canonical Greek gospel, (the content of which text was surely known to Leonardo) whose feast-days in the Roman Catholic Calendar are set at the two shadow-visible solstices (25 Dec & 25 June, respectively); we to-day would of course reckon the dates as 22 Dec and 22 June, but our ancestors calculated the 'dying' and 'rising' of Sol Invictus from the 25th day of the month, beginning at the point when the shadows cast on a sun-dial began to get longer or shorter depending on the time of year.

Interestingly, the 3rd canonical Greek gospel ('according to Luke', whoever he was) mentions the curious phrase placed into the mouth of 'John' ('[Whereas] he will always increase, I shall always decrease') which is a verbal-poetical depiction of the two opposing annual Terran solstices celebrated for thousands of years before the advent of Christianity, supported by the two Roman Catholic feast days set exactly 6-months apart on the solar calendar,which are surely not co-incidental.

Also the following phrases from the Gospel tradition seem to corroborate this typology '[Whereas] I baptise you with [living] water (i.e. the winter-spring wet season), there is one who is coming who shall baptise you with [destructive] wind and with fire, whose threshing-floor is already laid-out, and whose winnowing fan is already in his hand (i.e. the summer-autumn dry season).

It seems inconceivable to me that Leonardo was unaware of these inherent ancient solar-myth connexions when he set about to paint the two 'Dionysian-hermaphrodite-styled' John's.

Moreover, the story of the 'miraculous metamorphosis of water into wine' at the 'Wedding at Cana' illustrated in the 4th canonical Greek gospel ('according to John', whoever he was) shows a connexion with Bacchus-Dioynisius worship whose major pagan cult-centre was actually located at Cana in the (pagan-infested) areas of the Galilee (whose name derives from the Heb. 'HaGilgal-haGoyim', 'the circle of Gentiles' and whose inhabitants were forced-converted too Judaeism in 104 BCE during the High Priesthood of John Hyrcanus--in other words, the Galileans were late-comers to Judaeism) and might be a competitive myth among Christians to combat some of the miracles of the son of the divine-father & a mortal-mother (Dionysius-Bacchus) that were still being recounted in pagan antiquity long after 'Jesus' was executed by the Romans for armed sedition against the state.