Product Description

While other researchers strive to guess the meanings of paintings by such masters as Poussin, Leonardo and others, Peter Blake has reached very different conclusions. Other researchers have linked the paintings to the mysteries surrounding the French village of Rennes-le-Chateau, but Blake, from the recurrent geometrical themes found in key paintings of both Poussin and Leonardo, has overlayed the grids he found there on maps of Languedoc to pinpoint a never-before-discovered hill tomb. If the clues that have led him this far are right, this could be the final resting place of two of the most significant people talked about in the Bible. Through following the trail by which Blake found the tomb, the text unravels a rich cloth of learning and religion spun in secrecy over the centuries, and uncover the true identity of a host of historical characters, all party to the secret of the ciphers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #602794 in Books
• Published on: 2001-10-12
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

From the Author
The fascinating resolution to an enduring European mystery
The culmination of twenty years of research by Peter Blake, assisted for the last four years by myself, Paul S Blezard, this book presents new evidence and interpretations of the Rennes-le-Chateau mystery that first came to public prominence through Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln's book "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail".

Taking the Poussin work "Les Bergers d'Arcadie" as his starting point, Blake discovered that paintings by other, previously unconnected artists, also had a geometric coding in their compositions. This discovery catalysed a most extraordinary quest which led him to review the origins of religious thinking, through the civilisations of Babylon and Egypt and ultimately to a most unexpected and startling discovery which may have wider implications for the Christian Church.

As the co-author of this book, I hope that readers will find it both a fascinating record of Peters personal quest and a thought-provoking analysis of the history and secrets which lie behind this enduring mystery.

About the Author
Peter Blake is an art historian and former fine art dealer, framer and restorer. He lives in London. Paul S. Blezard is a writer and researcher.

Customer Reviews

Lightweight mish-mosh
While earnest and well-meaning, this book falls very short of cracking 'Christianity's Greatest Secret'. The research is poorly documented and the book oddly organized. After an interesting if somewhat wishful analysis of several key art works and their artisits, the authors spend the bulk of the book offering a fairly easy-to-read and nothing-new summary of Rennes-le-chateau, Gnosticism, the Magdelene tradition in the south of France, the Cathars, and so on. If you knew nothing about any of these things, this is not a bad overview. But if you're waiting for the big secret and the big discovery, it all happens in a couple of brief chapters at the very end. Their conclusions are very thin and undocumented, and quite a lot of the book just doesn't make sense. For example, they try to present the infamous "A Dagobert II Roi..." encoded message in the Rennes parchments as "A Dagoberti I Roi...", insisting that in archaic French in its latinized form Dagobert is Dagoberti. So all the experts that have come before never considered this or were unfamiliar with archaic French? In describing Poussin's The Deluge, the authors insist that a figure in the forground is swimming with a book (which they think represents esoteric knowledge). Granted I have not seen the originals, but in all the versions of this painting I've seen, this is not a guy swimming with a book-- it's a guy floating on a plank of wood. It just doesn't look like anything other than a plank of wood. As a final example, the authors find a pentagram-- and only one-- in Poussin's Shepards painting by extending lines from two staffs held by figures in the painting. Of course , other figures are holding staffs, trees are making lines, and there seem to be a wealth of pentagrams hidden in this painting. The authors choose the one they want and ignore the rest. And the one they choose isn't even a complete pentagram-- it runs off the page, which they say is a special 'active pentagram' with esoteric significance. Maybe so, but I don't buy it. Or much else in this rather sad entry.

Living proof some books should not be published!
This volume that holds "the quest to crack the code of Christianity,s greatest secret" is a poorly researched and poorly written story that appears to have been cobbled together. It contains many errors and indeed turns the theories of others into facts at the stroke of a few keys. The mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau holds an interest for many. It has helped to sell a few books over the years - pity it had to include this one!

Too credulous and thinly-researched to add weight to genuinely worthy quest.
I was very much looking forward to reading this book as it's subject matter - the Gnostic gospels, Hermeticism, the mysteries of Rennes-le-Chateau, and the study of art itself - is of huge interest to me. However, this reads as a very personal and subjective account and I have read far more authoritative texts on the topics involved. As a study into a particular aspect of art history, the theories put forward are more than a little tenuous and suggest that the research was not very thoroughgoing. There's a little too much reliance on phrases like 'it would seem...' and 'can we assume that..?'.. The lack of reproductions - found as a matter of course in other books in this line - of the key paintings discussed is a cause for concern as the reader cannot refer to the images to back up the text. To my mind, this book is far too speculative and readers expecting further insight into this fascinating subject would be well-advised to look elsewhere - if anything, the undertones of wishful thinking in this book actually lessen the credibilty of the theories and histories it so wishes to promote. On the whole, I'd say that even 'The Da Vinci Code' was more informative!