A district court judge who lectures on international art crime has found his work in the most unexpected place – the pages of Dan Brown’s latest blockbuster.
Hamilton-based Judge Arthur Tompkins, who each New Zealand winter teaches a course on art crime during war in a small town north of Rome, was stunned to find The Da Vinci Code author had lifted a passage of his writing for use in his latest New York Times bestseller, Inferno.
But this is no plagiarism scandal – Brown has been careful to credit the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art (ARCA), whose website Tompkins’ original writing appeared on.
In Inferno, Brown’s hero Professor Robert Langdon investigates the Horses of St Mark’s, also known as the Four Horses of San Marco, bronze statues believed to date to the fourth century.
The work of art with the longest history of crimes committed against it, the horses were taken from Constantinople by the Venetians during the Fourth Crusade in 1204, then taken by Napoleon from Venice in 1797.
Tompkins includes a segment on the horses in his course, and has them at No 2 on his “top 10 list of art crimes during war”.
In the book, Langdon visits the ARCA website and is “startled” by the following passage: “The decorative collars were added to the horses’ necks in 1204 by the Venetians to conceal where the heads had been severed to facilitate their transportation by ship from Constantinople to Venice.”
The passage helps Langdon to solve a riddle he’d been pondering.
ARCA notes on its website that the paragraph appears to have been taken from blogs by Tompkins in 2011.
Tompkins had written: “The collars were added in 1204 by the Venetians to conceal where the heads had been severed to facilitate their transportation by ship from Constantinople to Venice.”
A colleague in Italy emailed Tompkins and told him to check out the book. He popped into a bookshop in Matakana, north of Auckland, and found the relevant page.
“I went back and looked at the article I wrote in 2011 and there it was, that passage. It’s a small feeling of personal satisfaction that some work you’ve done has been read by someone else and then turned up in a place that I never would have expected to see it.”
Tompkins says Brown gets some of his facts slightly wrong – Brown says Napoleon displayed the horses on top of the Arc de Triomphe, when in fact they were displayed on a smaller arc nearby.
Ad Feedback
He is also definitive about where and when the statutes were created, when no-one knows for sure.
But that doesn’t bother Tompkins too much. “He’s very clever in the way he creates a feeling that he’s revealing important secrets, where none of it’s much secret at all. You get the feeling you’re on this enormous treasure hunt.”
Coincidentally, Tompkins visited Venice last year and saw the horses, returning with a reduced brass version which now sits on his desk at the Hamilton District Court.
He is heading back to Umbria, Italy, to teach his course in a couple of weeks.
–
