Artist believes he's found secret code in the Mona Lisa

 A New York artist believes he's "cracked the code" of Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" painting.

Ron Piccirillo stated on his blog that the painting is an optical illusion with one painting hidden within another. He refers to a "secret that has been hiding for five hundred years" as he claims to have found a lion's head, an ape head and a buffalo head in the painting while turning it around.

"I had first Googled this, but could not find anything on it," he stated. "How could something like this have gone unnoticed for five hundred years?"

The key to finding these illusions, Piccirillo said on the site, is to view them at an acute angle. If the viewer's eye is level with the painted horizon, he stated, the viewer may not be able to see them.

Piccirillo, a graphic designer, stated in a press release that he has solved mysteries in other pieces of Renaissance art as well.

The press release described how he read over da Vinci's writing and found passages to support his claims. He referred to a passage that he said shows the painting is not of a specific person but of the human trait envy.

"It's not every day you spot something that has gone unnoticed for 500 years," Piccirillo told the UK Daily Mail .

Readers of the Daily Mail story aren't buying it.

"There's nothing there at all," another said. "Any resemblance to an animal is purely coincidental."