Decoding the Da Vinci code
Anyone who has read Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code knows the startling revealations the book brings-up in the cloak of a fiction novel. I read the book some six months ago and it never ceases to amaze me.
For the first time in my life, I stepped into a bookstore’s history section and I was not disappointed. I browsed through many books with some wonderful illustrations from A World History of Art, The French Renaissance, and many others. Now I realize why these paintings are priceless. There is a certain mystery in the works by those that challenge the viewer to findout what secrets they hold in the seemingly obvious illustrations. It hit me when I was discussing about a book that had a simple looking sketch of a young woman. The author of the book kept mentioning that some of his students recognized the illustration as an old woman and then some others as what I observed. I eventually got to see that old woman in the same illustration after changing my perspective in looking at the image (I must mention that it was a plain 2-D sketch in black and white).
If one could find two totally different people in the same sketch by just altering the way we perceive, imagine the amount of illusion the color, shade combination would bring in. There could be virtually a hundred different ways, and you’d find something different every time or as many as the artist designed them to be.
Leonardo Da Vinci was one such artist who is known to have practised this kind of art. As a supreme geek, he challenged the viewers of his art to really find out for themselves what they’d perceive and whether they could get his point of view. Like any hacker, he probably never bothered to explain to the lesser-mortals what he intended. Until I read the book, to an ignorant me, Leonardo was just another painter that painted The Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. Another one came via an article in Wired about his supposedly flawed inventions (which, in all possibility, work).
Returning to the topic, I know many have read this phenomenal book and was wondering if anyone has read a non-fiction work in context of Dan Brown’s book by way of historical documentation. I’m no Christian, nor would I be worried if Jesus was indeed married to Mary Magdalene and if they gave birth to a girl child. Call it pure fascination and curiosity. There are quite a few publications that accuse the book of sensationalism that in fact does not exist and I am aware of one book that was directly linked on the Opus Dei site sometime ago.
So recommendations on further read, post Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, is something I’m looking forward to. Please do if you’ve read any.