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Having chosen Arts as my minor in university, I came across a lecture about Dan Brown’s bestseller “The Da Vinci Code.” I had heard a couple of things about this book, especially from a Christian and biblical viewpoint. In a nutshell, the book is about a conspiracy concerning the (biblically and historically untenable) alleged marriage between Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, which is supposed to have resulted in a still existing line of descendants. The Catholic Church wants to keep this a secret, of course. Brown claims that Leonardo da Vinci was among the insiders and that he put appropriate hints into his paintings, such as the “Lord’s Supper,” where the figure of the apostle John is allegedly the depiction of Mary Magdalene.

I was not really sure if I really wanted to hear the lecture today, since I expected it to blow into the same horn as Dan Brown. My fear was unwarranted, however. The lecture was held by Frank Zöllner, a leading Leonardo expert (list of publications in English). With a pleasant combination of details from art history and aesthetics and an eloquent presentation, he deconstructed Brown’s claims as well as his credibility as a writer. Zöllner gladly admitted that the book was a very captivating piece of writing. It was the very success of the book that motivated him to this lecturing series and lead to heated debates on the public interest in the science of aesthetics. However, he also warned emphatically about the absolutely unprovable respectively clearly wrong picture interpretations made by the author Dan Brown. I was impressed by Zöllner’s calm and factual analyses. A thesis that I find interesting beyond this context is that conspiracy theories result from a feeling of powerlessness.

Besides the art-historical blunders of Brown which Frank Zöllner exposed, I am concerned about the spiritual motivation behind the book. I am quite critical of the institutional (state) church myself. However, Brown goes much further by questioning the authority and credibility of the Bible as God’s Word. This in itself is nothing noteworthy for a “secular” author. The danger lies in his strategy of selling things as facts which are not facts at all, combined with using style so cleverly as to let his readers quickly forget that this is a novel and not a textbook. One can only hope for a responsible treatment of such books by the readers, which I find hard to do given the increasingly anti-Christian spin in the media.