‘Last Supper’ clues from Leonardo?

It’s a new Da Vinci code, but this time it could be for real.

An Italian musician and computer technician claims to have uncovered musical notes encoded in Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Last Supper,” raising the possibility that the Renaissance genius might have left behind a somber composition to accompany the scene depicted in the 15th century wall painting.

“It sounds like a requiem,” Giovanni Maria Pala said. “It’s like a soundtrack that emphasizes the passion of Jesus.”

In a book released Friday in Italy, Pala explains how he took elements of the painting that have symbolic value in Christian theology and interpreted them as musical clues.

Pala first saw that by drawing the five lines of a musical staff across the painting, the loaves of bread on the table as well as the hands of Jesus and the Apostles could each represent a musical note. The result is what he describes as a 40-second “hymn to God.”

Alessandro Vezzosi, a Leonardo expert and the director of a museum dedicated to the artist in his hometown of Vinci, said he had not seen Pala’s research but that the musician’s hypothesis “is plausible.”

“There’s always a risk of seeing something that is not there, but it’s certain that the spaces [in the painting] are divided harmonically,” he said in an interview. “Where you have harmonic proportions, you can find music.”