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Dan Brown has had a life-long fascination with codes and code-breaking.
When he was a child, his father, a high school maths teacher, set treasure hunts for Dan and his siblings involving coders and ciphers – a biographical detail which Dan later gave to one of the main characters in The Da Vinci Code.
Brown's first novel, Digital Fortress, centres on a US government code-breaking computer named TRANSLATR which is able to crack any code thrown at it – until it encounters a code it cannot break. Issues of secrecy, cryptography, surveillance and deception are constants in all his novels.
When he was a child, his father, a high school maths teacher, set treasure hunts for Dan and his siblings involving coders and ciphers – a biographical detail which Dan later gave to one of the main characters in The Da Vinci Code.
Brown's first novel, Digital Fortress, centres on a US government code-breaking computer named TRANSLATR which is able to crack any code thrown at it – until it encounters a code it cannot break. Issues of secrecy, cryptography, surveillance and deception are constants in all his novels.
Dan Brown has also long been interested in the enigmatic paintings of Leonardo da Vinci, which he first studied at the University of Seville in the 1980s. These two areas of fascination – Leonardo and cryptography – come together in The Da Vinci Code.
From the very opening moments of the novel, codes based on works of art by Leonardo are in play. Jacques Saunière, curator at the Louvre in Paris, is discovered murdered, his naked body posed like Leonardo's famous drawing of Vitruvian Man. In his dying 15 minutes, Saunière had hidden the key to a bank deposit box behind a Leonardo painting, and left a trail of written anagrams pointing to it, starting with "O, Draconian devil! Oh, lame saint!", which rearranged yield "Leonardo da Vinci! The Mona Lisa!"
From the very opening moments of the novel, codes based on works of art by Leonardo are in play. Jacques Saunière, curator at the Louvre in Paris, is discovered murdered, his naked body posed like Leonardo's famous drawing of Vitruvian Man. In his dying 15 minutes, Saunière had hidden the key to a bank deposit box behind a Leonardo painting, and left a trail of written anagrams pointing to it, starting with "O, Draconian devil! Oh, lame saint!", which rearranged yield "Leonardo da Vinci! The Mona Lisa!"
The Da Vinci Code is accurately named, because paintings and inventions by Leonardo figure strongly in the novel, including the artist's famous fresco of The Last Supper, and the deciphering of a cryptex – a stone cylinder opened by correctly aligning rings of letters. But there are many other types of cryptography in the book: mathematical, architectural, alphabetical, biblical and &ndash of course &ndash Leonardo famous mirrored writing.
Codes and symbols concealed in works of art is a good place to start when looking at the cryptography of The Da Vinci Code.
Codes and symbols concealed in works of art is a good place to start when looking at the cryptography of The Da Vinci Code.
