cities; greener pastures; and life itself

Allow me to take a detour from my usual topics about our environment to discuss something spiritual.

Now that the "Da Vinci" fever has subsided a bit, I feel that I can freely talk about it without adding to its popularity. For sure it gave church leaders a fever in trying to discredit the fictional portions of the novel.

I could n’t blame church leaders though for being so defensive. I guess they are just being good sheperds to us all. Especially to those who got so fascinated and intrigued by the novel. Undeniably, the novel has so much impact that it got a lot of us into reading. Others would n’t bother to read it though, for they just might get disturbed by it. On my part, I always encouraged everyone to just relax, and enjoy the fiction like we did to Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, with all its wizardries and antagonists. I mean the gospel of judas just went through our doorsteps, and nothing has changed, right?

I’ve first heard of the Da Vinci Code via friendster. A lot of people then included it in their list of fave books. One of my friends even says that she’s a senechaux by occupation in her profile. The storyline that there are secrets hidden in the works of art of a mysterious, jack of all trades artists made the book so intriguingly popular. Using as a cover the equally mysterious and popular painting of Da Vinci which is the Mona Lisa (thanks to Scooby Doo and other horror-comedy flicks), even made the book more attractive. But does n’t sound original, does it? Secrets hidden with clues right before our eyes, hmmm. Sounds like "National Treasure", hehe.

Like a lot of us, after reading the 489 pages or so of the book, I got disappointed. I got so disappointed not because it discredits the Bible, or not because it directly attacks the Vatican (that’s how it differs form the Last Tempation of Christ), but simply because I thought that the story is half-cooked. I mean what happend to the cover girl Mona Lisa. There’s nothing to be decoded in that mysterious painting, except for the curator’s handwritting on it before he died. "So dark the con of man"? It was the curator’s intentions who’s so dark when he vandalized the classic art work. Much more, what happened to Da VInci? How come so little was told about him and his work. And we still know too little about this painter. Nothing much than being the leader of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. After reading the book, I felt like I bought one of those pirated DVD’s that has three titles in it’s cover, but when you play it, you’ll realized that there are only two. Of course, it would n’t appeal too much if Dan Brown used the title The Curator’s Code.

I’m not really an expert when it comes to painting. A trip to the Met(Metropolitan Museum) and MOMA(Museum of Modern Art), both in New York, and other galleries and museums did n’t turn me into one. I’m just counting on to the bits of knowledge that I’ve accumulated in my Humanities and Ars and Aesthetics Theory classes in U.P. whenever I want to appereciate a visual art work.

I’m so sorry for Da Vinci that thanks to Dan Brown, a lot of people are now hostile to his character. Dan Brown could have paid tribute to him in a much better way. A manner where in we can appreciate the beauty of his works and the significance of his inventions. The Vitruvian Man is the basis for man’s anthrophometrics. Brown used it as a punchline. Poor Da Vinci, I wonder how he feels right now if he’s watching all of these from the after life.

It’s not new that an artist immortalizes a fellow artist in his work. A classic example would be Don MacClean when he payed tribute to Vincent Van Goh. In MacClean’s romantic ballad Vincent, he describe Van Goh’s personality and his landmark painting Starry Stary Night, so we will understand Van Goh better. MacClean did n’t use Van Goh to catapult his song into popularity. I wish the same was true for Da Vinci and Dan Brown.