Dan Brown's view of Renaissance art

Fiction

Brown claims that it was Leonardo da Vinci himself who, in painting The Last Supper, surfaced the great secret for all who had eyes to see. “The Last Supper practically shouts at the viewer that Jesus and Magdalene were a pair” (244).

Fact

Admittedly, the apostle John, at Jesus’ right hand, does have a feminine look to him in DaVinci’s masterpiece, but that was the master’s habit in painting younger men, as witness his portrayals also of John the Baptist and others. Moreover, the great artist could not possibly have had Mary Magdalene in mind or there would have been fourteen figures in his painting, rather than Jesus and the Twelve. If the figure to Jesus’ right is Mary Magdalene, where’s the missing John?

Fiction

Leonardo’s Mona Lisa (“La Gioconda”) is an androgynous self-portrait with a “secret smile” that derives from her name, which is supposedly an anagram of two Egyptian fertility deities Amon and Isis (121).

Fact

This painting is an actual portrait of a real personality, Madonna Lisa, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo.