Now that The Da Vinci Code has finally disappeared from The New York Times bestseller list, where it's been since, it seems, 1985, it's time to speculate on what the next Dan Brown novel might look like. How about this as an opening scene: an Italian art historian discovers a lost Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. But the historian is found murdered, his body impaled on the scaffolding just as he's about to reveal a part of the painting that gives a clue to a vast conspiracy involving the Vatican, the Masons and Mercedes-Benz to cover up the pope's past membership in the Waffen SS, during which he secretly married an Austrian woman and fathered Arnold Schwarzenegger. The historian's impaled body points to a square-jawed figure in the Leonardo painting wearing a black leather jacket, dark sunglasses, and holding an enormous, futuristic-looking gun . . .
This scene isn't so far fetched. An actual Italian art historian, Maurizio Seracini, is convinced there's a lost Leonardo painting under another painting in the Palazzo Vecchio. If Seracini sounds like a character in a Dan Brown novel, it's because he is: he appeared in The Da Vinci Code. He claims to know where Leonardo's The Battle of Anghiari is located by a clue in the fresco by Giorgio Vasari (above), which supposedly covers the Leonardo. The clue lies in a solder's cloak inscribed with the motto Cerca Trova, or "He who searches shall find." According to Seracini, The Battle of Anghiari is the lost masterpiece of the Renaissance, greater than any other work by Leonardo or anyone else during the period. Stay tuned--for the painting or the Dan Brown novel, or both. But Brown will have to come up with another murder victim, because it would be impolite to kill off a character based on a living person.
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