#da vinci code

In Chapter 10, we get the much-needed backstory for Silas, the novel's antagonist.

Turns out he was despised by his father for being born with albinism, a condition for which he blames Silas's mother. The father is a drunk who often beat his wife, and beat his son when he tried to defend her. Eventually, this father ends up beating her to death, which Silas blames on himself. He then stabs his father to death and runs away from home.

He ends up on the streets, where people treat him like he's a ghost and sometimes give him pitiful looks. He starts fighting with people and is eventually told to leave after he almost beats a girl to death for making fun of him. He then kills two men for real in another town, and is shoved in prison in Andorra for twelve years.

Some mysterious force breaks down a wall (it turns out to be an earthquake) and he manages to escape. He describes what happens to him afterwards as Opus Dei saving him, and he becomes the religious fanatic we see him as throughout the novel.

This is due to the fact that a priest (Aringarosa) nurses him back to health. This same priest eventually lets him read the part in the Book of Acts that speaks of a prison break that helps a person called Silas, who spent his days in prison singing hymns to God, escape due to an earthquake that makes all doors fly open. And therefore, the priest says he'll call Silas by that name, since Silas can't remember the name his parents had given him.

I think it's supposed to give him a somewhat sympathetic backstory, kind of like with Frankenstein's Creature – if the world hadn't rejected him, he may have been good. Granted, I might be reading a little too much into this, as we race through this description in a rather brief chapter (particularly when we compare it to how much time we spent with Langdon already).

Silas's character seems to be designed as foil to Langdon's secularism and his supposed heroism, whereas Silas seems to have stumbled into religious villainy. The issue is that we have another case of "battered people become bad".

It's no different from the childhood neglect Tom Riddle (Voldemort) suffered in Harry Potter, and we all know how nuanced Rowling designs her characters (coughcough). One of the reasons she gives for Voldy being the way he is, is that he was conceived without love. You can imagine how readers who were birthed into this world under similar circumstances felt about that reasoning behind his villainy, especially when he's explicitly stated to know nothing of love, which is what separates him from Harry.

Silas may be suffering from a very similar syndrome. His villainy seems set in stone, as if it just happened because he was abused and rejected by everyone. Realistically, people who end up rejected by absolutely everyone often exacerbate this reality themselves. If you have a nice personality, some people will want to be your friend. Even people who turned to mass murder who see themselves as total outcasts had people in life who loved them; they just didn't appreciate these people enough and often pushed them away in pursuit of that darkness they felt inside.

Hatred can certainly fester, as Silas is described as having hatred within him that he tries to control. Some people who became villains in real life actively had to lean into that darker side of theirs to meet another desire they had (which was to inflict pain on others). I don't think we'll get even halfway as deep with this villain character, as Brown designed him in the early 00s, so this stuff was seen as normal back then.

As Dan Brown claims?

No. No he was not.

This famous painting falls in line with many such paintings from the Italian Renaissance, believe it or not, in that it was painted in a monastic refectory.

This was the place where monks ate in silence. This scene was meant to mirror what they were doing themselves, so that they could achieve a spiritual closeness to this most important episode within the life of Christ.

^ and here's an example of something I've seen in person during our field trip to Florence. (I'll probably use this again in a future post.) Take note of how the physical architecture of the room extends into the canvas in the arches. It is literally painted to be seen as an extension of the refectory the monks sat in. (They also used to have tables on platforms, so they were effectively almost at eye-level with Christ and the Apostles.)

Historians and Catholics alike can just, you know, ignore any topic about a figure they might find awkward, as they have since the dawn of their field/religion.

I don't know how true a bunch of the other things Brown stated in his text are, such as Da Vinci being a "flamboyant homosexual". While he appears to have had some accusations of 'inappropriate' relations with male apprentices (actually falling more into the category of pederastry, which you'll recall is actually a crime now, and not really something I would ever dare dub as "homosexual", since it repeats that old lie about gay people disproportionally tending towards abuse of children – I'd strongly recommend not actually calling people like Da Vinci gay for this very reason, as we have no documented evidence of him exhibiting such behaviour with adult men), we don't have much evidence for the occult mess Brown mentions.

He was accused of such things because of the other thing Brown mentions, which is him using corpses to study anatomy. (Note that this later became standard practice for artists, so clearly the Church wasn't permanently mad about it.) HOWEVER, Da Vinci didn't exhume graves. He worked in hospital crypts. The corpses he used were fresh and he wasn't necessarily not allowed or supposed to be there.

Again, we repeat a bit of truth and morph it into a slanderous lie towards a historical figure, just to get from point A to point B in our mystery, which uses a suspicious amount of bad historical fiction here.

Historical fiction is either very close to the truth, or so blatantly fictional that people can tell you're playing around with it. Generally, there are points between these two extremes, but it's important to make it clear to the audience which things you're doing.

My favourite example is the Steve Jobs biopic from 2015, starring Michael Fassbender, who looks nothing like Steve Jobs. Although I wrote a blog post about this ages ago (long since deleted) and couldn't find the "none of it happened, but it's all true" quote, it does apply to it.

Steve Wozniak, Jobs's longtime friend and business partner who founded Apple with him, said that due to his facial blindness, he wasn't bothered by what people said about Fassbender not looking like Jobs. He said that he acted like him, and it felt like him (paraphrasing).

Basically, he meant that because Fassbender didn't attempt to copy Jobs or really try to look like him, he was seemingly freed from those constraints to capture Jobs's actual vibe. A lot of events are dramatised, but they feel like the real thing in a way that direct copies never could.

We can often experience relatively mundane things as very intense, and if you were to put them to film, they'd look mundane to everyone else, even though we remember them as much more than that. To me, that's what historical fiction should be about.

We don't just randomly tell lies; we embellish to capture the essence of something. We don't just tell people Da Vinci was a weirdo genius, we make people feel it in a way they can understand. Showing his design for flying machines, even though we know that was mad in his day, won't have a dreamlike effect on us, because we've probably been on a plane before.

So we find different ways to showcase how this happens. I've been a huge fan of just drowning the audience in mysticism to show how Catholicism worked, for example. Just show them what we would now identify as magic, because that is how people experienced Mass. A miracle, right in front of their eyes, as the priest raised the Host. There was Christ, in the flesh, right in front of them. Nowadays, we can play all the bold music we like, tell people Catholics see Christ there (or are technically supposed to), and all people will see on a screen is a round cracker.

(I couldn't find a GIF of a host being raised during Mass, so here's a picture of Elwynn Forest in the rain instead, which will mean nothing to you if you've never played this game, but to me it's a pretty representation of something I've loved since I was 10.)

And thus a miracle becomes silly. An occult Da Vinci isn't scary to us, but rather kinda cool, even though that is also a lie. King Francis I of France and his sister thought Da Vinci was so amazing that they practically begged him to come to France and be at their court. Da Vinci was awe inspiring when he was practically completely blind and useless, and THAT is what this narrative should have captured.

But instead, we get some throwaway lines about Da Vinci being an "awkward subject". The reasons as to why are only clear to us if we have no knowledge of how the Church works, or how historians talk about historical figures, and how such talks have evolved over the centuries.

You can imagine, I hope, the actual awkward position this puts me in, because I know that for the most part, Dan Brown is full of it here.

You may say to me, well Lauraine, that's a Vitruvian man in a circle! You just said it NEEDED a square!

Sure did. Because Dan Brown needs to connect it to Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man drawing for his story to make sense. There have been numerous artists who've separated the two into two distinct images to explain Vitruvius's text on ideal human proportions, one in which the man stands inside a square, and the other inside a circle.

Da Vinci placed him in both. Not only that, but the bottom part of Dan Brown's own description actually contains this information in the line "[c]onsidered the most anatomically correct drawing of its day". He knows Da Vinci did more with this drawing than other artists, but I'm not so sure he's actually aware of the origins of its title.

If he was, he'd realise while yes, Da Vinci's drawing is by far the most famous and has become a cultural icon in many respects, there are many others like it. They're just much less than what Leonardo managed.

If he'd bothered with researching just why the drawing received that title, he'd know that in order for a person who supposedly knows something about art (as he claims Langdon does) to realise it's specifically Da Vinci's drawing, he'd need both a circle AND a square around a naked body. Otherwise, it's just a corpse inside a circle.

In other words, Saunière is essentially every single Vitruvian man except Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. That's actually quite impressive in how poorly done this section is for someone who holds a degree in art history, as Dan Brown does.

Note: it is possible that when Brown studied art history***, this subject was underdeveloped, since we're moving further towards actual reality instead of just clapping for Renaissance artists and scoffing at postmodernists as many of our predecessors have done.

Lastly, I'll leave you with a final reference to the text above, where I'll remind you that Brown explicitly omits the fact that Da Vinci's drawing contains not one but two figures, one of which is inside a circle, and the other inside a square. What is described in the text here is just not Da Vinci's drawing, not matter how much Langdon insists that it does.

(admittedly, this poor rendition of this image might fool a complete layperson when it comes to art into thinking of this image first, but Langdon is supposed to be an expert, so this passage still makes no sense unless he's seen the title of the book he stars in)

In the words of Glidus (admittedly about Game of Thrones), this is nonsense! People did argue, and it was a huge plot point! Wtf!

While the examples I listed are higher members of the Church, discovering that human women produce eggs through science has caused the Holy See to use a story of a young girl who said she met the Virgin Mary in a cave (in Lourdes by Saint Bernadette, born 1844) to develop the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception out of this.

Random people and facts shake up the Church a lot more than it wants to admit, but it is therefore by no means a closed organisation that Catholics wouldn't feel comfortable arguing with. Especially if they hail from historically more Protestant countries like mine, because we learnt how to argue to the point of annoyance from our neighbours who were grumpy on Sundays and dressed in black.