Was Da Vinci an "Awkward Subject" for Historians?
This famous painting falls in line with many such paintings from the Italian Renaissance, believe it or not, in that it was painted in a monastic refectory.
This was the place where monks ate in silence. This scene was meant to mirror what they were doing themselves, so that they could achieve a spiritual closeness to this most important episode within the life of Christ.
^ and here's an example of something I've seen in person during our field trip to Florence. (I'll probably use this again in a future post.) Take note of how the physical architecture of the room extends into the canvas in the arches. It is literally painted to be seen as an extension of the refectory the monks sat in. (They also used to have tables on platforms, so they were effectively almost at eye-level with Christ and the Apostles.)
Historians and Catholics alike can just, you know, ignore any topic about a figure they might find awkward, as they have since the dawn of their field/religion.
I don't know how true a bunch of the other things Brown stated in his text are, such as Da Vinci being a "flamboyant homosexual". While he appears to have had some accusations of 'inappropriate' relations with male apprentices (actually falling more into the category of pederastry, which you'll recall is actually a crime now, and not really something I would ever dare dub as "homosexual", since it repeats that old lie about gay people disproportionally tending towards abuse of children – I'd strongly recommend not actually calling people like Da Vinci gay for this very reason, as we have no documented evidence of him exhibiting such behaviour with adult men), we don't have much evidence for the occult mess Brown mentions.
He was accused of such things because of the other thing Brown mentions, which is him using corpses to study anatomy. (Note that this later became standard practice for artists, so clearly the Church wasn't permanently mad about it.) HOWEVER, Da Vinci didn't exhume graves. He worked in hospital crypts. The corpses he used were fresh and he wasn't necessarily not allowed or supposed to be there.
Again, we repeat a bit of truth and morph it into a slanderous lie towards a historical figure, just to get from point A to point B in our mystery, which uses a suspicious amount of bad historical fiction here.
Historical fiction is either very close to the truth, or so blatantly fictional that people can tell you're playing around with it. Generally, there are points between these two extremes, but it's important to make it clear to the audience which things you're doing.
My favourite example is the Steve Jobs biopic from 2015, starring Michael Fassbender, who looks nothing like Steve Jobs. Although I wrote a blog post about this ages ago (long since deleted) and couldn't find the "none of it happened, but it's all true" quote, it does apply to it.
Steve Wozniak, Jobs's longtime friend and business partner who founded Apple with him, said that due to his facial blindness, he wasn't bothered by what people said about Fassbender not looking like Jobs. He said that he acted like him, and it felt like him (paraphrasing).
Basically, he meant that because Fassbender didn't attempt to copy Jobs or really try to look like him, he was seemingly freed from those constraints to capture Jobs's actual vibe. A lot of events are dramatised, but they feel like the real thing in a way that direct copies never could.
We can often experience relatively mundane things as very intense, and if you were to put them to film, they'd look mundane to everyone else, even though we remember them as much more than that. To me, that's what historical fiction should be about.
We don't just randomly tell lies; we embellish to capture the essence of something. We don't just tell people Da Vinci was a weirdo genius, we make people feel it in a way they can understand. Showing his design for flying machines, even though we know that was mad in his day, won't have a dreamlike effect on us, because we've probably been on a plane before.
So we find different ways to showcase how this happens. I've been a huge fan of just drowning the audience in mysticism to show how Catholicism worked, for example. Just show them what we would now identify as magic, because that is how people experienced Mass. A miracle, right in front of their eyes, as the priest raised the Host. There was Christ, in the flesh, right in front of them. Nowadays, we can play all the bold music we like, tell people Catholics see Christ there (or are technically supposed to), and all people will see on a screen is a round cracker.
(I couldn't find a GIF of a host being raised during Mass, so here's a picture of Elwynn Forest in the rain instead, which will mean nothing to you if you've never played this game, but to me it's a pretty representation of something I've loved since I was 10.)
And thus a miracle becomes silly. An occult Da Vinci isn't scary to us, but rather kinda cool, even though that is also a lie. King Francis I of France and his sister thought Da Vinci was so amazing that they practically begged him to come to France and be at their court. Da Vinci was awe inspiring when he was practically completely blind and useless, and THAT is what this narrative should have captured.
But instead, we get some throwaway lines about Da Vinci being an "awkward subject". The reasons as to why are only clear to us if we have no knowledge of how the Church works, or how historians talk about historical figures, and how such talks have evolved over the centuries.
You can imagine, I hope, the actual awkward position this puts me in, because I know that for the most part, Dan Brown is full of it here.
We're still only on page 68.
