Thursday, May 7, 2009

The Leonardo Code

So I read Angels & Demons last weekend at the beach, and now I'm going back and reading The Da Vinci Code. Then I'm going to watch both of the movies! The stories are pretty good, and the books are fast-paced.
However, it really really irks me that all these cryptologists, curators, art scholars who spend their lifetimes devoted to studying Leonardo da Vinci, etc, in the novels refer to him as "da Vinci" instead of "Leonardo." Everyone in the real world who knows anything about art knows that "da Vinci" refers to where Leonardo is from, and that the art world refers to the artist as "Leonardo."

Read more here. I especially like this concluding paragraph:
"Da Vinci," then as now, indicates "from Vinci" – a distinction shared by many thousands of people born and raised in Vinci. If one felt utterly compelled, say, at gunpoint, to use "Da Vinci," he or she would need to be certain to write "da" (the "d" is not capitalized) and "Vinci" as two separate words.


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