This Is Marvellous

The mainstream appropriation of Leonardo Da Vinci continues unabated. I've avoided countless television programmes examining whether The Da Vinci Code, a work of fiction, holds up as fact. More books have been written about it than Dan Brown has ever read and they were all finished in a fraction of the time. And now Marvel Comics is getting in on the act.

The promo art for a new comic "event" storyline called The Other spoofs a very famous Da Vinci drawing. In the context of Spider-Man, an eight-legged man doesn't seem quite so odd: note how the insignia on his chest has two limbs pointing up and two down, just like Leonardo's Vitruvian Man. The original has mysterious mirror-image Latin text describing the proportions of the human body. Marvel's version has backwards text too though it's tongue-in-cheek, as the following excerpts demonstrate:

Obesa cantavit
In dentibus anticis frustrum magnum spiniciae habes
Nonne de novo eboraco venis?
Quid quid latine dictum sit, altum videtur

Cunning linguists can have a crack at deciphering these phrases before reading their translations in the comments section.