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always claim that he was “only thirty-nine.” The Japanese secret services went out of their minds trying to figure out who this Jack Benny was, and then attempting to pin down his actual chronological age, whereas every American soldier knew instantly that no matter what year it was, the answer would forever be “thirty-nine.”
    Thankfully, neither of these codes was cracked. An almost unknown language and a bit of Americana “insider info” helped win the war by masking essential information so that only the intended audience could comprehend it.
    USING CODES IN ART
     
    Codes proved their value many times over in wartime. Far less obvious, though, is the way hidden messages found a place in another setting with universal significance. Here the intent was not to deceive an enemy but to intensify a sense of mystery, not to achieve military conquest but to produce greater appreciation. It is in art and in some of its most famous expressions that we readily realize an important truth: artistic geniuses often produced their greatest works when they incorporated concealed meanings in their masterpieces.
    Art—at least great art—by its very nature has varying levels, or layers, of meaning. In fact, a masterpiece comes to be considered a masterpiece because we know instinctively, even subconsciously, that there is much more to the work than meets the eye. We don’t love the Mona Lisa because she is beautiful (in fact, in today’s aesthetic, she would be considered plain by many), but because she is mysterious. That is the key to the world’s fascination with her for the last five centuries. We know that there is something else there beneath the surface, beneath that smile, and we can’t quite figure it out.
    It is hard for us in the twenty-first century to appreciate how much it was taken for granted in the Renaissance and Baroque periods that artists always incorporated multiple layers of meaning in their work. We have to realize art’s function at a time when people lacked the myriad sensory stimuli we encounter every day, all day. In a world without cable channels and satellite television, videos and DVDs, movies and the Internet, an artist’s creation was the one ever-present object that had to serve as a source of pleasure and inspiration over and over again, year after year, without becoming stale. If an artist of the caliber of Leonardo or Michelangelo was paid a hefty commission for a new private piece of art, that artwork had to be a constant delight and stimulus for the rest of the patron’s life, and then usually go on to become a family heirloom. If an artwork was commissioned by the government, it had to serve as a permanent expression of that society’s ethos and values. And, as we saw in the preceding chapter, a major motivation for someone like Pope Sixtus IV to commission the expensive original decorations of the Sistine was the fact that serving as patron for the creation of fine art was at that time also the greatest demonstration of power and wealth.
    The biggest patron of the arts throughout this time was of course the Catholic Church. But for the clergy, art served yet another function. Church art was meant not only to glorify a place of worship or to inspire the faithful; it was also designed to teach the masses, who were almost entirely illiterate. Thus, captivating, textless illustrations of important stories from the Gospels and the lives of the saints were needed to “enlighten the benighted,” to instruct the next generation in the ways and the history of Christendom. This explains why so many medieval and Renaissance churches have incredibly colorful and intricate fresco cycles, sometimes narrating an entire biblical book. (Ironically enough, this tradition is considered by many to be the origin of today’s comic book and graphic novel.)
    For people at that time, just as today in many corners of the world, going to mass, aside from fulfilling one’s religious obligations, was the