According to the Last Supper Theory website, an amateur researcher called Slavisa Pesci has discovered new figures in the painting by superimposing a reverse image over the original. The figures are supposed to be a knight and a person holding a baby. You can find the story, and the images here.

These Da Vinci code theories get more and more delightful – who would have thought that Da Vinci had access to such sophisticated image manipulation? But wait, there’s more. I decided to have a go myself and layered a flipped image over the original. Here it is:

I must admit I haven’t examined it too closely – hard on the aging eyes, you understand – but I do think I found something significant in the area highlighted below.

Here’s a close up:

See? It’s the Devil!

Well, I’m sure if you did this long enough you’d find all sorts of conspiracies lurking in this painting – or any painting come to that. Don’t know how Pesci did it – the video is in Italian and I can’t be bothered downloading it, but he seemed to have used an image printed on film over the original. I did my images in Paint Shop Pro, but you can use any graphics program that uses layers.

First make a duplicate (shift D in PSP) of the original. Then do what you like with the duplicate – flip it, mirror, whatever. Go back to the original and make a new raster layer over it. Go to the duplicate and copy it. Now paste the duplicate over the original so that it fits exactly.

The new layer will have its own control in ther Layers box at the right of your screen (or wherever that is in other programs). Change the opacity of the superimposed layer to 50 per cent and voila! You can see through to the bottom layer, merged with whatever the top layer superimposes on that image. Have fun.