Not The Da Vinci Code!

Dan Brown's hokum The Da Vinci Code has done more than cause a stir in the Law Courts of London and in the Christian Church. It's spawned a new arts search engine Trumalia that's posting "enigmas" for arts fans to solve (rewards on offer) and the US Portland Museum of Art has brought its faded La Gioconda out of mothballs, presumably to cash in. The Portland version (left) is supposedly a preparatory study for the Mona Lisa. Experts have dated the work to the same period, but don't tell me Leonardo had a hand in this obviously inferior copy of his Mona Lisa. Leonardo's drawings are superb, so I would expect the master's hand to show in any preparatory work. The daub on the left is a real bummer. She looks like Miss Piggy having a bad hair day. Clean it and X-ray it, Portland, and let's see what you've really got. Click the title link to visit Trumalia.