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Chapter 70
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Da Vinci Code, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Conspiracies and Secrets
Art and Symbolism
Faith vs. Knowledge
Sacred Femininity and Revisionist History
Power and Manipulation
Summary
Analysis
Langdon, Sophie, and Teabing crowd around the keystone’s box to examine the engraving beneath the rose. Again, Langdon can’t decipher the strange, slanted script. Teabing demands a turn inspecting the words, only to find that he can’t read it either. When the box reaches Sophie, she immediately recognizes the script. Langdon flashes back to an auction at Harvard for some of Da Vinci’s folios, which he initially thought illegible before realizing the painter had written in reverse. Likewise, the words on the box can be read with a mirror, or by peering through the thin wood—as Sophie does now. The text is English. Meanwhile, a disconcerted Rémy watches over Silas, who seems to be in a trance.
Sophie easily discerns Saunière’s writing as a reverse script, demonstrating how the simplest explanations can hide in plain sight. Again, the curator alludes to one of Da Vinci’s idiosyncratic behaviors, as the painter also wrote backwards on occasion. Both Rémy and Silas have been awkwardly relegated to the sidelines and are generally powerless in this situation.
Themes
