Da Vinci Code
Oscar-winning director Ron Howard reunites for the third time with double Academy-Award winner Tom Hanks for the big-screen adaptation of Dan Brown's international best-seller The Da Vinci Code. The adventure starts with a bizarre murder in the Louvre Museum in Paris, dragging our heroes - acclaimed symbolist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks), and cryptologist Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou) - into a web of puzzling riddles and mystery. As they pursue the frantic trail of clues around France, England and Scotland, all the evidence seems to implicate a secret religious fraternity who will stop at nothing to protect an unimaginable secret that has been suppressed for over 2,000 years. The book has been inconceivably popular selling over 30 million copies worldwide, yet it has also been subject to much controversy – we can only expect a tremendous summer blockbuster from the film version.
In The Da Vinci Code movie, Robert Langdon examines the original version known as the Madonna of the Rocks, which now hangs in the Louvre Museum in Paris, for hidden messages in the way the characters have been painted. Eventually he discovers a key concealed behind the painting. That's fiction - but the fact is the National Gallery has its very own Da Vinci mystery. In 2005, experts discovered two underdrawings beneath the surface of the London Virgin of the Rocks. The first of these is completely different to the picture we know so well today.