On a rainy day in Paris last week, 50-year-old Linda Ackerman headed to the Louvre for a bit of detective work. Her checklist included the "Mona Lisa," a painting that she had seen before -- but not this way, not with new eyes on the "Cracking the Da Vinci Code at the Louvre" tour.
Sure enough, just as author Dan Brown had described in his novel, "The Da Vinci Code," Ackerman noticed for the first time that the woman in the Renaissance masterpiece looked androgynous. Ackerman took in the bulky shoulders, masculine face and, of course, the Smile. In Brown's mystery-thriller, Da Vinci left clues in his artwork pointing to an explosive secret about early Christianity and the irresistible notion of a cover-up by the Catholic Church and other power players.
In Paris, throughout the U.S. and elsewhere, insatiable fans are exploring the controversial themes in "The Da Vinci Code," even pulling members of the intelligentsia into the novel's energy field. The book's grip on the popular imagination is so fierce that academics and theologians are putting aside their ancient Greek and Latin texts and boning up on Brown's characters, including a self-mutilating, white-haired albino villain.
"The Da Vinci Code," which was published by Doubleday a year ago this week, is the fastest-selling adult fiction title ever, with more than 6.5 million copies in print in the U.S., according to a Publishers Weekly report to be released Monday. It has been translated into more than 40 languages and has sparked a wave of nonfiction titles analyzing Brown's theories. And just wait until Ron Howard's film adaptation is released in the next year or so by Columbia Pictures.
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Captivated audience
Such is the fascination with the book that readers are seeking connections, no matter how remote. At a mall in Port Charlotte, Fla., fans of the book were among those who recently paid $2 each to study a wax-figure display of "The Last Supper," another painting in the book that holds clues to the key mystery.
In Chicago, even Cardinal Francis George reportedly read the book because so many people were asking him about it. He told the Sun-Times that he was afraid the book would "undermine people's faith." (George's office did not return calls for comment). Art historians and other experts who can speak on the book have become the rock stars of the lecture circuit, packing in crowds from across the religious spectrum.
