[source] Summary:

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Russian: “Протоколы сионских мудрецов”, or “Сионские протоколы” ; see also other titles) is a tract alleging a Jewish and Masonic plot to achieve world domination. The book purports to be derived from “protocols” written by a secret group of Jews known as the Elders of Zion, and underlies 24 protocols that are supposedly followed by the Jewish people. The Protocols has been proven to be a literary forgery and hoax as well as a clear case of plagiarism.

[source] The text is alternatively known in English as:

• Protocols of the wise men of Zion
• Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion
• Protocols of the meetings of the learned elders of Zion
• Protocols of the Meetings of the Zionist Men of Wisdom
• The Illuminati Protocols
• Protocols of the Sages of Zion
• Protocols of Zion
• The Jewish Peril
• The Protocols and World Revolution
• Praemonitus Praemunitus
• The War Against the Kingship of Christ.

Zion

[source] Zion (Hebrew: צִיּוֹן; Tiberian vocalization: Ṣiyyôn; transliterated Zion or Sion) is a term that most often designates the Land of Israel and its capital, Jerusalem. The word is found in texts dating back almost three millennia. It commonly referred to a specific mountain near Jerusalem (Mount Zion), on which stood a Jebusite fortress of the same name that was conquered by David and was named the City of David.

The term Zion came to designate the area of Jerusalem where the fortress stood, and later became a metonym for Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, the city of Jerusalem and the entire Promised Land to come, in which, according to the Hebrew Bible, God dwells among his chosen people.

Priory of Sion

[source] The Prieuré de Sion, translated from French as Priory of Sion, is a name given to multiple groups, both real and fictitious. The most notorious is a fringe fraternal organization, founded and dissolved in France in 1956 by Pierre Plantard. In the 1960s, Plantard created a fictitious history for that organization, describing it as a secret society founded in the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1099, which serves the interests of the Merovingian dynasty and its alleged bloodlines. This myth was expanded upon and popularized by the 1982 controversial book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, and later claimed as factual in the preface of the 2003 conspiracy fiction novel The Da Vinci Code.

Artwork

Artist: Nicolas PoussinYear: 1637–1638
Type: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 185 cm × 121 cm (72.8 in × 47.6 in)
Location: Musée du Louvre
Associations: “The Tomb of God”, “The Place of the Skull”, Golgotha

Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (February 8, 1591 — December 9, 1666),

[source] “Et in Arcadia ego” is a Latin phrase that most famously appears as the title of two paintings by Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665). They are pastoral paintings depicting idealized shepherds from classical antiquity, clustering around an austere tomb. The more famous second version of the subject, measuring 121 by 185 centimetres (47.6 x 72.8 in), is in the Louvre, Paris, and also goes under the name “Les bergers d’Arcadie” (“The Arcadian Shepherds”). It has been highly influential in the history of art and more recently has been associated with the pseudohistory of the Priory of Sion myth popularised in the books Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code.

[source] The tomb inscribed with the cryptic phrase “Et in Arcadia ego” in Nicolas Poussin’s late 1630s painting Arcadian Shepherds was appropriated for Priory of Sion myth-making.

[source] The skull speaks. It says “Et in Arcadia ego” or simply “Vanitas.” In a first-century mosaic tabletop from a Pompeiian triclinium (now in Naples), the skull is crowned with a carpenter’s square and plumb-bob, which dangles before its empty eyesockets (Death as the great leveller), while below is an image of the ephemeral and changeable nature of life: a butterfly atop a wheel—a table for a philosopher’s symposium.

[source] In the arts, vanitas is a type of symbolic still life painting commonly executed by Northern European painters in Flanders and the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The term vanitas itself refers to the arts, learning, and time. The word is Latin, meaning “emptiness” and loosely translated corresponds to the meaninglessness of earthly life and the transient nature of vanity. Ecclesiastes 1:2 from the Bible is often quoted in conjunction with this term. The Vulgate (Latin translation of the Bible) renders the verse as Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas. The verse is translated as Vanity of vanities; all is vanity by the King James Version of the Bible, and Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless by the New International Version of the Bible.

Matteo Loves
Madeleine pénitente
Ferrare, Fondazione Cavallini Sgarbi

Pieter Claesz

Hendrik Andrieszen – (17th Century)

Bailly David

Willem Claesz (1594-1680)

Bailly David

Simon Renard De Saint-Andre (1613-1677)

Jansz Van-der-Shoor (1660)

Guido Mocafico

Guido Mocafico

Simon Renard De Saint-Andre (1613-1677)

Simon Renard De Saint-Andre (1613-1677)