Vinci debunks Brown's 'code'

It is the publishing phenomenon of the new century: Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, the biggest-selling adult novel in history, bought by more than 18 million worldwide, argued about from high table to lunch counter, and which has enraged the Catholic Church as no book has done for decades.

It has prompted family rows, lawsuits, tours of the key locations and a diet, and will soon be a film.

Its claims have provoked no fewer than 15 book-length rebuttals and super-charged interest in Leonardo himself, the man whose code and genius are at the book's heart.

The people of Vinci, the small town outside Florence where Leonardo originated, might be thought grateful for all this attention.

But they are livid. And, to show just how mad they are, this weekend they put the book on trial.

It wasn't a fair trial - Brown and his book went unrepresented - but by the standards of Italian justice it was swift. And it galvanised Vinci. Hundreds turned up.

Brown claims the local hero was flamboyantly homosexual; the Mona Lisa was a disguised self-portrait; hermaphrodites and pagan imagery lurk behind every fleur-de-lys; and the figure of John in the Last Supper is actually Mary Magdalene. Leonardo was head of a secret society, the Priory of Sion, entrusted with the care and perpetuation of the Holy Grail, which in turn was not a mere chalice but the bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, the woman he married. Jesus and Mary had children, the novel claims, and it was Leonardo and the descendants of Jesus who preserved the truth of the pre-eminence of the female principle.

Alessandro Vezzosi, director of one of Vinci's two Leonardo museums, made the case for the prosecution, deploying over 100 slides.

Leonardo's homosexuality? The evidence, he said, was "total invention".

A striking sketch of two erect phalluses, one pursuing the other, flashes on to the screen: thought to be by Leonardo, it was in fact the work of someone else, Vezzosi claimed.

The most diabolical figure in Brown's book is the huge, homicidal albino Silas, a devotee of Opus Dei who wears a spiked belt on his thigh to mortify his flesh, and who is determined to wipe out the only four people in the world who know the truth about the Holy Grail - the truth that threatens to blow the bottom out of Christianity if it ever becomes known.

"I've come here to tell you what Opus Dei really is," said Massimo Marianeschi, a businessman and member of the Catholic organisation. "It's not a sect, it's not black, criminal, catastrophic ... I don't flog myself or mortify my flesh. It's a lay organisation with no monks - it's not Machiavellian, we don't assassinate people, we don't sanction any negative acts."

- INDEPENDENT