Da Vinci Code

This is a recent best seller from Dan Brown which draws together the Grail Legend, the bloodline of Christ, the Templar Knights and a whole host of other familiar and not so familiar conspiracy theory fare into an okish thriller (well more than ok - I couldn't put it down over the weekend). You could call it Foucault's Pendulum Lite. It was interesting enough to make me try and see how much of it has any basis (in fact or even in conspiracy theory) or did he make up loads of it e.g. do any art historians think that the andrognous figure to Jesus' right in Da Vinci's Last Supper might be Mary Magdalene and not the apostle John (ans: not too many, in the perparatory drawings for the LS the apostle is labeled John). And it seems plenty others are as well - there are 4 soon to be published books which explore the ideas and purported facts used in the book. But maybe the best thing about the book is that it made me want to visit some of the locations - Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, Newton's tomb in Westminster, the Louvre, the church at Saint Sulpice through which the Rose Line runs (the pre Greenwich meredian in Paris). Posted by eamonn at March 8, 2004 10:00 AM