'Vanity Fair': 'Da Vinci Code' plot is similar to earlier work

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In an article titled "The Da Vinci Clone?" that appears in the July issue of Vanity Fair, set to hit newsstands this week, Seth Mnookin compares plot similarities between The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (2003) and Daughter of God by Lewis Perdue (2000):

*Perdue: An American art curator travels to Europe to meet with the owner of a priceless art collection.

Brown: An American professor is summoned to meet with a curator at the Louvre.

*Perdue: The collector tries to pass on "an ancient secret; a religious truth, knowledge that can change the entire course of human affairs."

Brown: The Louvre curator tries to reveal "one of the most powerful secrets ever kept" to allow an "unbroken chain of knowledge."

*Perdue: The art collector is murdered to try and prevent him from sharing his secret.

Brown: The museum curator is killed to try and prevent him from sharing his secret.

Mnookin also notes that in both books:

*The secret at the center of the story is the sacred role of women in early Christianity.

*Clues are hidden in artwork.

*The primary story line has a hero and heroine trying to puzzle out the secret and a secondary plotline in which Catholic Church officials try to stop them and discover the secret first.

Mnookin notes that in The Da Vinci Code, Brown describes a lost robot of da Vinci's as "an outgrowth of his earliest anatomy and kinesiology studies" and that it was "designed to sit up, wave its arms, and move its head via a flexible neck while opening and closing an anatomically correct jaw."

On a website for the Institute and Museum of the History of Science in Florence, Italy, the robot is described by robotics expert Mark Rosheim in a 1996 paper as "an outgrowth of (his) earliest anatomy and kinesiology studies" and "was designed to sit up, wave its arms, and move its head via a flexible neck while opening and closing its anatomically correct jaw."

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