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Others insisted that the suspicious placement of disciples in The Last Supper was some kind of code.
Still others claimed that X rays of the Mona Lisa revealed she originally had been painted wearing a lapis lazuli pendant of Isis--a detail Da Vinci purportedly later decided to paint over.
Langdon had never seen any evidence of the pendant, nor could he imagine how it could possibly reveal the Holy Grail, and yet Grail aficionados still discussed it ad nauseum on Internet bulletin boards and worldwide-web chat rooms.
Everyone loves a conspiracy.
And the conspiracies kept coming.
Most recently, of course, had been the earthshaking discovery that Da Vinci's famed Adoration of the Magi was hiding a dark secret beneath its layers of paint.
Italian art diagnostician Maurizio Seracini had unveiled the unsettling truth, which the New York Times Magazine carried prominently in a story titled "The Leonardo Cover-Up." Seracini had revealed beyond any doubt that while the Adoration's gray-green sketched underdrawing was indeed Da Vinci's work, the painting itself was not.
The truth was that some anonymous painter had filled in Da Vinci's sketch like a paint-by-numbers years after Da Vinci's death.
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