Master Leonardo, standing in the thrid row of the platform, kept a keen eye on everything and, from time to time, scribbled mysterious jottings in one of the notebooks he always carried with him. It seemed to me that he paid the same attention to the faces in the crowd as he did to the sound of Santa Maria’s organ, or to fluttering banners of different groups in attendance. Someone had told me that the previous afternoon he had fallen into ecstatic contemplation over the flight of four hundred pigeons released in the Piazza del Duomo, and that he had listened with rapt delight to the cannon blasts from the city walls that the papal nuncio had ordered in honor of the late dutchess. For Leonardo, everything merited attention, everything held within itself traces of the secret science of life. (page 135)

If the entire book reflected the quote above, I would have been entranced by this book. Sadly, it did not. The book is not about Leonardo Davinci so much as about a minor fictional figure named Father Agostino, a Papal Inquisitor who is investigating the possible heresy of use of symbols in Leonardo’s work.

In the media, this book was presented as a smarter alternative to The Davinci Code. Frankly, I liked The Davinci Code better and I’m not a great fan of Dan Brown.

The book is a foggy chaos of poorly developed characters, a scattered and complicated plot and vague details which, for the most part, went right over my head. The premise is fascinating but it ultimately fell flat. It didn’t help that I actively disliked the main character and found the author’s depiction of the ‘spiritual life’ of the monks of Santa Maria to be pretty bleak.

One positive observation: The author positively bashes the Catholic Church and everything it stands for. I enjoyed this angle of the book and the various historical elements.

But overall, the book fell flat for me. How much did I hate this book? I didn’t even finish it. I had a mere two more chapters to go and I just couldn’t do it.