Key to the Sacred Pattern: The Untold Story of Rennes-le-Chateau by Henry Lincoln

Key to the Sacred Pattern: The Untold Story of Rennes-le-Chateau by Henry Lincoln

Author:Henry Lincoln [Lincoln, Henry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: plantard, rennes-le-chateau, holy blood holy grail, treasure, knights templar, france, pyranees, henry lincoln, priory of sion, pattern, Bérenger Saunière, key
ISBN: 9781310841972
Publisher: Grave Distractions Publications
Published: 2015-08-27T22:00:00+00:00


Chapter 7

The Poussin Geometry Appears

The story of the Cathares is powerful and moving. Set against it, the venality of treasure-hunting seems almost sacrilegious. But important steps have been taken in the unravelling of the mystery of Rennes-le-Château and they need to be included in the film.

My visit to the Louvre to examine the x-ray of The Shepherds of Arcadia has left a 'dangling loose end'. There is an unexplained apparent anomaly in the painting of the right-hand shepherd's staff. Time and again, I have returned unavailing to this problem. But I am learning 'not only to look, but to see'. I am also learning to ask the simple question. If one sets out on a hunt for complexities, then those very complexities may obscure a simplicity which is crying out for attention. As I work on the script, I turn yet again to the question. This time, I ask myself: 'What is the simplest thing I can say about this staff?' The answer is: 'It is cut in two by the shepherd's arm.' I find my dividers and set the distance from the base of the staff to the line of the shepherd's arm. From this point to the top of the staff proves to be precisely the same. The stick is not simply cut in two—it is exactly cut in two. I measure the distance from the top of the staff to the tip of the shepherd's pointing finger. Again, the distance is precisely the same. Already the scent of discovery is in my nostrils. Why should such rigid exactitude have mattered to Poussin? Did it, in fact, matter? Or have I simply stumbled upon another of Blunt's 'extraordinary coincidences'?

I test the left-hand shepherd's staff. From the top to that point where it is cut by the kneeling shepherd's back is, again, the same fixed measure. From that mid-point to the base—yet again. This can hardly be coincidence. I embark upon a careful, inch by inch study of the painting. In half-an-hour, I have identified a score of repetitions of the half-staff measure. I am as baffled as I am overawed. Even at first sight, the painting is clearly a work of genius. But now I am discerning another layer of virtuosity. Poussin has presented us with a fluid, relaxed, harmonious idyll of calm serenity, And yet he has achieved this against a rigid and formal geometric framework. Is such rigorous and inflexible control a usual method in his work? Not for the first time in the Rennes-le-Château saga, I find myself sliding out of my depth. This study requires a knowledge and an expertise which I do not possess.

Professor Christopher Cornford of the Royal College of Art has made a special study of the geometric construction of paintings. He agrees to undertake an analysis of The Shepherds of Arcadia. In order not, in any way, to influence his thinking, he is, at the outset, told nothing of my detection of the half-staff measure. He approaches the problem with no preconceptions of any kind.



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