It is all carried off with aplomb, but it also leaves readers wondering: how much does this murder mystery have to do with the real Leonardo? Even Opus Dei, the controversial Roman Catholic movement, surfaces here as a shadowy force, struggling to acquire this potentially explosive information. The discovery of a murdered Louvre curator, found in the pose of Leonardo's celebrated ''Vitruvian man'' - a figure inscribed in both a circle and a square - sets in motion an ingenious plot involving numerological symbolism, verbal puzzles and an alternative version of Christianity, wrapped up in the legend of the Holy Grail. In the book, the author unabashedly adapts Leonardo's art and theories, which he says on his Web site he researched extensively, to his own fictional requirements. That Dan Brown's thriller ''The Da Vinci Code'' has successfully tapped into popular interest in Leonardo is resoundingly confirmed by its 18 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list. No other artist is burdened with such baggage, but then, the ambiguity and gaps in our knowledge render him a blank sheet onto which almost anything can be projected. Controversial in life, Leonardo still provokes a bewildering range of admirers and detractors.
His interests ranged from music and anatomy to art and the occult his uncanny ability to predict inventions like the airplane, and the rarity and enigmatic nature of his few finished paintings, conjure up the very image of the Renaissance man. LEONARDO DA VINCI enjoys greater name recognition than almost any other artist.
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