Does The Da Vinci Code Crack Leonardo?
By BRUCE BOUCHER LEONARDO DA VINCI enjoys greater name recognition than almost any other artist. His interests ranged from music and anatomy to art and the occult; his uncanny ability to predict inventions like the airplane, and the rarity and enigmatic nature of his few finished paintings, conjure up the very image of the Renaissance man. Controversial in life, Leonardo still provokes a bewildering range of admirers and detractors. No other artist is burdened with such baggage, but then, the ambiguity and gaps in our knowledge render him a blank sheet onto which almost anything can be projected. That Dan Brown’s thriller “The Da Vinci Code” has successfully tapped into popular interest in Leonardo is resoundingly confirmed by its 18 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list. In the book, the author unabashedly adapts Leonardo’s art and theories, which he says on his Web site he researched extensively, to his own fictional requirements. The discovery of a murdered Louvre curator, fo
