Da Vinci Code Art, History, and the Louvre

By Elizabeth Bard

Elizabeth Bard is a journalist, art historian, and an expert guide for Paris Muse, a group of Paris-based art historians offering private tours in the city’s museums. Since they began offering their "Cracking The Da Vinci Code at the Louvre" tour in February 2004, Bard and her colleagues have led more than a thousand visitors in the footsteps of the book and the movie.

”Is this where the curator’s body was found?”

“I read that there are heretical codes and messages in Leonardo’s paintings. Is that true?”

Although our company, Paris Muse, had been leading private tours in the Louvre for some time, in the spring of 2003 we began to hear these same curious questions over and over again. There was clearly a new buzz at the museum, but we were puzzled by the source. Then one of our guides picked up a copy of The Da Vinci Code in the airport on the way back to France after summer vacation. Now that we understood where the questions were coming from, we could begin to develop the answers. We also had a great idea for a new Paris Muse tour: Cracking The Da Vinci Code at the Louvre.

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Join the Discussion

Have you been on this tour? Do you know of a similar activity in your city?

What do you think about people looking at art history this way? It's easy to see why people want to look further into issues raised by The Da Vinci Code -- but do you think it's right? Share your perspectives.

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As art historians, we wanted to give our clients more than a glorified plot summary. For us, the Louvre is much more than a chance to walk in the footsteps of the novel. As a group, we’ve spent hundreds of hours exploring its labyrinth of galleries, and the treasures within.

We decided to develop a tour that would explore the Louvre’s collections through the lens of the novel’s themes. Beyond the obvious choices of the plot-related paintings by Leonardo da Vinci (several of whose most famous works are in the Louvre’s collection), we chose works of art that would help us explore the controversial questions raised by novelist Dan Brown. How did ancient peoples worship the sacred feminine? Did Christianity entirely obliterate these practices? How do signs and symbols evolve over time? Did Christianity really “steal” things from pre-Christian traditions? What do images of Mary Magdalene tell us about her changing role and her relationship with Jesus? Are there subversive “clues” buried in Leonardo’s paintings? We realized that not only could we answer the questions people were already asking--we could expand the discussion, allowing the works of art themselves to have a say in the debate.

“Cracking The Da Vinci Code at the Louvre” immediately became Paris Muse’s most requested tour. Part of its appeal for our visitors is that it offers a fun and focused way to navigate what can be an overwhelming museum. Some of them are excited to see the actual locations described in the book. For many, the story has sparked new ways of thinking about art and religion. They come to see for themselves if they are convinced by Dan Brown’s theories.

We first meet our visitors under Napoleon’s Arc du Carrousel, just outside the museum. It’s a fitting place to begin, since Napoleon’s famous quip—“What is history, but a fable agreed upon”--is one of the book’s most memorable lines. It also says a lot about Paris Muse’s approach. We get up close to the Louvre’s collections and find out how one work of art can tell many different stories, depending on who’s doing the telling, and when! Very interesting.

The Sacred Feminine

Our first stop inside the Louvre is the collection of terracotta sculptures from ancient Greece. Perhaps the nicest part of taking a wider view of the book is that we can get off the main tourist track. We often have these galleries, with their great view of the Cour Carré, the Louvre’s central courtyard, all to ourselves!

Many of the figurines displayed here are kourotrophos, dating from the fourth to sixth centuries BC. Kourotrophos are commemorative statues that worshippers would have brought to the temples as offerings, a parallel to the practice of lighting a votive candle in church. They give our visitors a more concrete idea of what the “sacred feminine” might look like in the history of art.

Some of these female figures depict draped mothers holding their babies on their laps--an image that bears a striking resemblance to later Christian images of the Madonna and Child. But these particular sculptures were used to worship the primary goddesses of ancient Greece: Venus, the goddess of love and beauty, Demeter, the goddess of agriculture, and Athena, the goddess of wisdom. These goddesses express many of the basic needs of ancient women--to bear healthy children, have plentiful harvests, and make wise decisions. The figure of the mother and child will follow us throughout the history of art--from the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis with her son Horus, to the tender paintings of mothers and children by the late-ninteenth-century American painter Mary Cassatt.

The Bell Idol (700 BC) from Thebes is one of the most captivating sculptures in these galleries. She is in the form of a woman, but she also has an elongated neck, hollow center, and dangling legs that recall a bell. Because her body also emulates the shape of an inverted chalice, visitors see a very early example of one of the central metaphors in Brown’s book: the idea of the woman’s body [i.e., Mary Magdalene] as a sacred vessel. Just like our Bell Idol, this is a metaphor with legs. It has followed us all the way from ancient Greece to the New York Times bestseller list!

We also look closely at how the Bell Idol was decorated by its anonymous artist. There are dancing women painted on her skirt, and holes in her ears where gold earrings once hung. She also has a geometric motif on her neck that, because of its misleading similarity to the Nazi swastika, people are often shocked to find on a sculpture made over 2,700 years ago. Tracing this symbol’s complex history is a great opportunity to talk about Robert Langdon’s fictional job description--professor of symbology at Harvard University. Although academics might not use that term, Brown has picked up on a key tool of art historians. We call it iconography, the study of signs and symbols and how they develop over time.

Cultural Recycling: Paganism and Early Christianity

The second part of the tour takes us downstairs to the Louvre’s Roman sculpture collection, housed in what were once the sumptuous summer apartments of Anne of Austria, mother of Louis XIV. Here we begin looking at art of the early Christian period (first to fourth century AD) to see if we can identify exchanges between early Christianity and pagan religions.

Nothing in Christianity is original. This controversial claim of Teabing’s is the starting point for our discussion here. Visitors learn that there are indeed elements of pagan religion--symbols, rituals, even dates--that are shared with Christianity as it develops from an upstart religion in the first century AD to the official religion of the Roman Empire under Constantine in the fourth century AD.

A double-sided Mithraic relief (second to third century AD) is a particularly striking illustration of a complex process The Da Vinci Code calls “transmogrification,” a fancy word for cultural recycling. The sculpture was made for followers of the Mithraic cult, a religion that developed alongside Christianity. The cult of Mithras was adapted from an ancient Persian religion, based on a Supreme Being. It spread to Rome and even as far away as Britain, since it was popular with military men who brought their beliefs with them as they traveled through the empire.

This particular relief depicting Mithras was found in Rome; it tells us quite a bit about the Mithraic cult’s mythology and rituals. On one side, the central deity Mithras is shown sacrificing a sacred bull, whose blood gives eternal life. Beneath Mithras a dog, symbol of goodness, and a serpent, symbol of evil, vie to drink the blood. The narrative is not unlike the story in Genesis, where good and evil (also represented by the serpent) battle for eternal life.

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Join the Discussion

What do you think about Paganism and its influence on Christianity? Is this the first you've heard of it or have you studied this before? Offended or enlightened? Share your thoughts with us.

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Mithras also has quite a lot in common with the figure of Jesus. They are both referred to in their own traditions as the Son of God and Light of the World. They are both born on December 25. As the approximate date of the winter solstice, this was an important festival for many pagan religions, and was likely adopted by early Christians because no birth date for Jesus is specified in the New Testament. Both Mithras and Jesus are said to have died and been resurrected after three days.

On the other side of the relief, we see the figure of the Supreme Being presiding over scenes of worship. He has the rays of the sun around his head, which recall the halo we see in Christian art to identify holy figures. Throughout the history of art, one culture or tradition will make use of existing signs and symbols, adding their own layer of meaning.

This side of the panel also shows us two figures of Mithras, one accepting symbolic nourishment from the Supreme Being, the other preparing a ritual sacrifice. Because the Mithraic cult was an all-male religion, it was kind of like an American college fraternity--you had to go through initiation rites to prove that you were man enough to belong. The relief illustrates two of those rites: drinking the blood of a sacrificed animal and the symbolic eating of the body of the Supreme Being.

Of course, these rituals immediately recall for visitors the Christian practice of Holy Communion. This is not to say that early Christianity “stole” the idea of communion from the Mithraic cult. Rather, the point we encourage visitors to consider is that there were elements of god-eating rituals in many religions of this period. In fact, many rituals and symbols we think of today as exclusively Christian have roots in earlier religious traditions.

The Mithraic relief is a highlight for many visitors interested in the idea of religion as a constantly evolving process, rather than a fixed group of texts or rituals set in stone.

Leonardo in the Louvre

Stepping into the Grande Galerie is often the moment when the events of the book snap back into focus for our visitors. This is where Jacques Saunière, the fictional curator, is murdered, and where Robert and Sophie find their clues tucked away behind Leonardo’s paintings. While we do point out these plot points, we also tell visitors a bit about the rich history of the building, before it became the backdrop of a bestselling novel and Hollywood film.

This imposing gallery was the grand entertainment space of the French kings when the Louvre was a royal palace, and it was the first part of the building to open to the public when the palace became a museum in 1793. Today, this fifteen-hundred-foot hall is the nerve center of the Louvre, home to the Italian Renaissance collection, including five paintings by Leonardo.

The Grande Galerie is also the busiest part of the museum. A typical weekday afternoon can look like rush hour at Grand Central Station, so part of our challenge here is to carve out a contemplative experience for our visitors. The Louvre is rapidly approaching eight million visitors a year, and 90 percent of them pass through the Grande Galerie on their hurried trek to the Mona Lisa.

We let the crowds sprint by us, stopping to take in works by lesser-known artists. We also look closely at all of the other Leonardo paintings in the collection, so by the time we get to the Mona Lisa, visitors know enough about his style to approach his most famous work with confidence.

The Mona Lisa’s knowing smile presents a direct challenge to the viewer--and to us as guides. How do you intelligently “explain” the world’s most talked-about work of art? As we try to do with all of the works on our tour, we engage the visitor’s own observations in front of this painting. We ask them what they think. As The Da Vinci Code makes clear, there are many competing interpretations to negotiate. We try to separate fact from fiction, art history from popular legend.

The Mona Lisa is usually dated between 1503 and 1506, though there are scholars that believe Leonardo may have continued to work on it as late as 1513 or 1514. One thing is sure--the sitter never received her painting. Leonardo kept it with him until the end of his life. After his death, the painting passed into the French royal collection, which became the national collection after the French Revolution of 1789.

Dan Brown gives us a quick summary of the different theories about the Mona Lisa during a fictional art history class that Robert Langdon teaches at a Boston prison. One racy option, according to Langdon, is that Mona Lisa is a self-portrait of Leonardo in drag. In 1910 Sigmund Freud wrote an article suggesting that Leonardo was homosexual. This fuelled speculation that some of Leonardo’s drawings, once thought to be self-portraits, may have been studies for the Mona Lisa. There are even scientists who have done computer morphing to match the bone structure and facial features of these drawings with that of the Mona Lisa! In fact, we have no firmly established likeness of Leonardo in his own hand--although art historians continue to argue this point, so the self-portrait theory of the Mona Lisa, as appealing as it may be, doesn’t hold a lot of water.

Dan Brown adds his own bit of speculation to the search for her identity. He doesn’t think she is a real woman at all, but rather a combination of the ideal masculine and the ideal feminine: Mona Lisa becomes an anagram for Amon and Isis, the Egyptian fertility gods. As other Da Vinci Code commentators have pointed out, this, too, is implausible, since the painting was not known as the Mona Lisa in Leonardo’s lifetime, nor is it known as the Mona Lisa in French or Italian today.

Once again, we ask visitors to consider this theory against the likeness they see in front of them. We also let them know that Leonardo scholars have identified the sitter as Lisa Gherardini, wife of the wealthy Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo. The Mona of the painting’s title--adopted only in the nineteenth century and therefore not Leonardo’s choice--is actually short for Madonna (Madame or Mrs. in Italian). Her famous smile may also be a nod to her married name. Giocondo means “joyful” or “jovial” in Italian; an increasing number of scholars think that her smile may be a pun on her last name. That’s why the French call her La Jaconde--the smiling one!

Drag queen or Florentine matron, in the end what really matters is what resonates with what we can actually see. Visitors enjoy testing out Brown’s theory of an uneven horizon line in the background of the painting. We test to see whether or not it makes Mona Lisa “look” more majestic from the left, as Brown says, favoring the side of the painting historically associated with the feminine. The two halves of the landscape do tend to strike visitors as uneven. But if you look carefully, the horizon line actually runs straight across the upper reaches of the painting, near her eye level. Leonardo is always leading us toward her face, particularly her expressive eyes--the window of the soul. The background itself is an idealized fantasy, a mixture of actual Florentine landscapes, allegorical symbols, and Leonardo’s lifelong obsession with botanical and topographical drawing. This mixture of the specific and the universal tells us something very important about the way that Leonardo worked. He was always searching for the ideal through the real.

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Join the Discussion

Mary Magdalene- was she a prostitute or an apostle and/or wife to Jesus? We'd like to hear what you think. Share your perspectives.

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Mary Magdalene: The Harlot and the Hermit

After the crush of crowds in front of the Mona Lisa, it’s a relief to escape downstairs to the ground floor, into the cool and echoing hallways of what used to be Napoleon III’s stables. We look at several paintings of Mary Magdalene on the tour. Some suggest a prostitute, others a pious disciple; there is even one where she has what could be argued as a look of wifely devotion.

In fact, we end not with a painting, but with a sculpture of Mary Magdalene. But unlike the typical image of the scarlet harlot that we see in so many of the late medieval and early Renaissance paintings upstairs, here we find a beautiful and very secular-looking nude with long flowing blond hair and a serene expression. She looks more like Botticelli’s Venus rising out of the sea than the lamenting woman often depicted at the foot of the cross.

This sculpture takes us out of Italy and into the early German Renaissance, around 1515. The sculptor, Gregor Erhart, worked in and around Augsburg. His Mary Magdalene has been carved out of a single piece of wood and delicately painted.

When we see Mary Magdalene like this, wearing her hair and nothing else, it illustrates legends about her life as a hermit, which pick up where the Bible leaves off. The legend tells us that Mary fled Jerusalem after the crucifixion. She sailed across the Mediterranean Sea in a rudderless boat, landing on the southern coast of France. From there, she went to the caves at St. Baume where she lived for thirty years as a hermit, doing penitence for her sins. She survived without food, water or clothing--just a choir of heavenly angels to lift her up to Christ during her prayers. In fact, this sculpture was originally meant to be hung from the ceiling. She would have been surrounded by a group of sculpted angels to show us the moment when Mary Magdalene ascends to Christ through her prayers.

We close our tour with this exquisite German sculpture because it highlights the main ideas that visitors take home after looking at many images of Mary Magdalene in the Louvre: the understanding of her role in Christianity has evolved, and will continue to do so. Whether or not we believe Brown’s theory that Mary Magdalene was the literal wife of Jesus, in Western art she has definitely represented both a spiritual and a more worldly love for Jesus. We see how beautiful her nude body is here, and are reminded that sensuality is very much of this earth. But her peaceful gaze is meant to convey a higher, more spiritual type of beauty.

One thing is certain: anyone who thinks that Goddess worship is dead in Christianity has never seen this!



See also:

• Codes and Symbols
• Da Vinci Code: History
  
• Glossary of Terms
• Mary Magdalene and the Sacred Feminine

• The Da Vinci Code Effect
• The Dan Brown Revelations
• The Da Vinci Code Tour of the Louvre