The Real Leonardo

By Elizabeth Lev

Along with trashing Christianity, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is a veritable museum of errors where Renaissance art is concerned. Art historians have been slow in responding, mostly because it is difficult to know where to start. The novelist’s imaginative notions of iconography may make for best-selling fiction, but they are wildly at variance with what is known about the life and work of Leonardo.

The Da Vinci Code denies Leonardo da Vinci’s identity as a Christian artist, working for Christian patrons and painting Christian subjects. Ignoring the sacred nature of Leonardo’s work, Brown twists the images, inserting them into a tawdry tale of his own making.

The author’s thumbnail sketch of Leonardo cavalierly disregards his birth and training, and dives directly into unsupported claims that Leonardo had “always been an awkward subject among historians, especially in the Christian tradition.” Yet Giorgio Vasari, the father of art history, writing a few years after the death of Leonardo, gives the painter pride of place in his biography, The Lives of the Artists.

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