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The Catholic Church's objections to plot points of The Da Vinci Code are by now well known. Less attention has been paid to some of the cockamamie things Code claims about the master Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci.
He and his art are supposed to be crucial to the deep, dark secret at the heart of Code, but art historians are either snickering about some of the more risible howlers in the book and movie -- or silently steaming about the liberties taken with the great artist's reputation.
But why Leonardo and not, say, Michelangelo or Raphael, his contemporaries and rivals? Because, scholars say, Leonardo is both instantly recognizable and mysterious.
"We don't know that much about him as a person, and that makes him an enigma," says Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, a cultural historian and specialist in religious art at Georgetown University. "He wasn't just a painter, he was a scientist and an inventor. He had multiple personas and interests, and that fascinates us."
Now author Dan Brown and the moviemakers have added a few more stories to the Leonardo lore. Some examples of mistakes they made:
That's not his last name
Call him Leonardo: "Da Vinci" isn't his family's last name; it's the town near Florence where his family lived and he was born. Few individuals in Europe had surnames (as we understand them) in the 15th and 16th centuries; thus, Michelangelo and Raphael also are referred to by their given names.
There's writing
on the 'Mona Lisa'
The protagonists shine ultraviolet light on the painting in the Louvre and ghostly, cryptic writing appears, supposedly put there by a murdered Louvre curator. Talk about heresy.
"To suggest that a curator would write on one of the greatest masterpieces of Western art? It's disrespectful, and hard to accept," says Apostolos-Cappadona.
That's Mary Magdalene, not John, in 'The Last Supper'
The central thesis of the plot is that Jesus had a child with Mary Magdalene and their descendants still live, but the Catholic Church has covered it up for 2,000 years.
The book/movie suggests that John (the youngest apostle) looks more like a young woman than a young man in the much-deteriorated painting. But that's how young men were portrayed at the time, and Leonardo was especially praised for his skill in this area.
"From the 15th through the 17th century, the figure of a young male was depicted as angelic and androgynous," says Matthew Landrus, a Leonardo scholar and author of The Treasures of Leonardo da Vinci.
"The more feminine the look, the more accurate he would be. This is Leonardo showing off his skill."
Leonardo's paintings contain secret codes and messages
Renaissance artists dealt with symbols and allegory to convey religious doctrine and messages to a mostly illiterate population; hiding secret messages in their paintings would have defeated that purpose.
The book/movie deals with codes and symbology "much too facilely, without putting it into cultural context," says Apostolos-Cappadona. Sometimes the color red is just that, and sometimes it means royalty or sensual passion or the passion of Christ or divinity or blood of all sorts or the Eucharist.
Mix-ups in the 'Madonna
of the Rocks'
The painting is better known as Virgin of the Rocks, but that wouldn't have worked with Code's thesis that an anagram of the title leads to another clue in the plot.
Brown's book says this work was commissioned by a group of nuns; actually, it was commissioned by a group of laymen. The book also gives the wrong dimensions of the painting, leaving the impression it is smaller than it actually is and that Sophie (played in the movie by Audrey Tautou) could easily pick it up and move it.
Leonardo never heard
of the Priory of Sion
Code claims Leonardo was a member of a secret society sworn to protect and pass on the knowledge of the existence of the blood descendants of Jesus. But Leonardo died in 1519 and the Priory of Sion was invented by a hoaxer in the 1960s.
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