Ellen McBreen has been taking American tourists on private art history tours of the Louvre for more than three years, but only recently have they stopped in the Grand Gallery to ask, “Is this where the curator died?”
Her customers have been reading “The Da Vinci Code,” Dan Brown’s blockbuster art mystery that takes place in the world’s most famous museum.
“It didn’t take us long to figure out that there was a demand for knowledge about the theories in the book,” she says.
So in mid-February, McBreen’s company, Paris Muse, began offering “Cracking the Da Vinci Code” tours of the Louvre. They instantly became the company’s top offering.
“The Da Vinci Code” has been in the Top 10 on Publishers Weekly’s best-sellers list, compiled from publishers’ reports, for 50 weeks and, recently translated, was already at No. 3 in France the week before last.
Here are a few fun facts from McBreen’s tour for fans of the book:
– The Grand Gallery where the curator is killed really does have a parquet floor.
– The Caravaggio painting the curator takes down so easily weighs at least 200 pounds and is held by steel cables. It would take the strength of Hercules to move it, giving the old guy less energy to get shot, run down the hall, leave intricate clues and die.
– The gates, rest rooms and a bunch of other rooms described in the book don’t exist, at least not in the locations described by Brown.
– The Da Vinci painting “Madonna of the Rocks” can’t be ripped by a knee; it’s painted on wood.
– Mona Lisa is almost certainly a woman, not a man. Still, “because of Dan Brown, people are looking at the Mona Lisa much, much more closely,” McBreen says. Themes raised in the book–pagan symbols in Christian art, the role of Mary Magdalene and the theory of the “sacred feminine”–are fairly complex ideas. McBreen takes her customers toward understanding.
You might start by knowing only what you read in the book, but you’ll end up wiser about art.
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Edited by Cara DiPasquale ([email protected]) and Kris Karnopp ([email protected])
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