Inferno Decoded

by Michael Haag

  ALIGHIERI, DANTE The author of the Divine Comedy (1265–1321), and the inspiration for Dan Brown’s Inferno; see Chapter One for the full story of Dante’s life.

  ALVAREZ, MARTA The petite and pregnant arts and culture administrator who shows Robert Langdon around the Palazzo Vecchio. She is based on a real person as in the book’s acknowledgements Dan Brown thanks ‘the bright Marta Alvarez González’ for spending so much time with us in Florence.

  ANTONUCCI, EUGENIA A secretary at the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Eugenia is distressed to hear of the death of her boss, the corpulent Ignazio Busoni: ‘the woman was weeping now, her voice full of sadness’. Dan Brown thanks a real-life Eugenia Antonucci for her help at the Bibliotecca Medicea Laurenziana.

  ARCA Some years before the events depicted in Inferno, Robert Langdon saw a display by the prominent equine theatrical troupe Behind The Mask in New Hampshire. He so admired their jet-black Friesian mounts that he researched the breed online. Finding that such animals had inspired the robust aesthetic of the Horses of St Mark’s, and that said equestrian statues had repeatedly been stolen, he visited the website of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art, to learn more. The Association does exist, www.artcrimeresearch.org

  ATELIER PIETRO LONGHI As Dan Brown so rightly says, the Atelier Pietro Longhi is one of Venice’s premier providers of historical costumes.

  BOTTICELLI, SANDRO The life and work of Sandro Botticelli (c. 1445–1510), considered by Robert Langdon among others to be ‘one of the true giants of the Renaissance’, is examined in Chapter Six. His Map of Hell is a central image in Dan Brown’s Inferno, and is reproduced on pp.148–149 of this book.

  BROOKS, SIENNA At the age of five the fictional character Sienna Brooks played the mischievous Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the London Globe Theatre (renamed the Gielgud Theatre in 1994 and not to be confused with the modern recreation of Shakespeare’s Globe); she is no less an actress in adulthood. But there is nothing put on about her need to wear a blonde wig; her hair loss is the result of a stress-related scalp disorder which she describes as ‘telegenic effluvium’ – probably a slip of the tongue for the condition ‘telogen effluvium’ – which was triggered by a traumatic event that led her to train as a doctor and to devote her life to saving the world.

  The Behind The Mask equine troupe, as seen by Robert Langdon – or was it Dan Brown? – at a celebrity wedding reception in New Hampshire.

  BRÜDER, CRISTOPH Another fictional character, this former military man with an umlaut over his name and an emotionless sense of duty works in the Surveillance and Response Support division of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. He operates under the authority of Elizabeth Sinskey, director of the World Health Organisation.

  BRUNELLESCHI, FILIPPO As explained in Chapter Five, Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) was a pivotal figure in the emergence of humanism in Florence. He was responsible for constructing the dome that tops the city’s Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral, and as Dan Brown describes, his sculpted figure can still be seen ‘seated outside the Palazzo dei Canonici, staring contentedly up at his masterpiece’.

  BUSONI, IGNAZIO The fictional director of the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, that is the Museum of Works of the Cathedral in Florence, containing works of art originally intended for Santa Maria del Fiore. He is popularly known as il Duomino, translated as ‘little dome’ in the book, though, more exactly, duomo means cathedral (from the Latin domus, house, as in house of God); therefore il Duomino would mean ‘little cathedral’. At any rate he is an oversized man in every way.

  COLLINS This is the name of the man who introduces himself over the phone to Robert Langdon as the American Consul General’s chief administrator in Florence, a reminder that you should believe only half of what you see and nothing of what you hear.

  CONSORTIUM, THE Dan Brown announces in the ‘Fact’ section at the start of Inferno that ‘The Consortium is a private organisation with offices in seven countries. Its name has been changed for considerations of security and privacy.’ In interviews to promote the book, he elaborated: ‘The Consortium is obviously not the real name. There are a number of organisations that function as the Consortium. They are fairly easy to research. I had not heard of them until I started writing this novel. But they’re out there and for hire and allow you to tell very convincing lies.’ At one point in Inferno, the provost reflects that the experience with Bertrand Zobrist ‘would not be the first time the Consortium had been hired by paranoid scientists and engineers who preferred working in extreme isolation’.

  COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS A non-profit American thinktank, the Council on Foreign Relations was founded in 1921, and does indeed have its headquarters at Park and 68th in New York. It’s not clear, however, why Bertrand Zobrist has access to its conference rooms.

  DANDOLO, ENRICO The ‘wizened, blind doge’ of Venice, Enrico Dandolo (c. 1107–1205) was well into his nineties when he led the conquest of Constantinople in 1204, and died there the following year. Robert Langdon’s realisation that Dandolo is not buried in Venice and he must head to the doge’s tomb in Istanbul – ‘Sienna, we’re in the wrong country’ – is a startling moment in Dan Brown’s Inferno, not only for its drama, but because any student of Venetian or Byzantine history and art, let alone a Harvard professor, should have known that.

  DANIKOVA The panicked woman with a thick Eastern European accent who blurts out helpful if highly sensitive information on Sienna’s answering machine. It may be her poor grasp of English that leads her to imagine that as a British national Sienna would require a working visa in Italy; citizens of member states of the European Union are, in fact, free to travel, live and work anywhere within the EU without a visa.

  DOOMSDAY CLOCK In chapter 50 of Inferno, Bertrand Zobrist is credited with having created a Doomsday Clock, which shows that ‘if the entire span of human life on earth were compressed into a single hour … we are now in its final seconds’. Although Bertrand’s clock takes population as its reference point, the actual Doomsday Clock has been maintained since 1947 by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Rather than ticking steadily down, it’s adjusted back and forth according to their perception of the threat of nuclear catastrophe.

  ERNST, MAX In chapter 2 of Inferno, Robert Langdon feels as though he has awoken inside a painting by the German-born Max Ernst (1891-1976), a pioneer of the Dada movement and surrealism who lived in France and the United States. Dan Brown does not specify which painting he felt he had woken up in, but Ernst did write a memoir that was modelled on Dante’s Vita Nuova. It featured his alter ego, the Bird Superior Loplop, which he also painted many times.

  ESCHER, M C As mentioned in chapter 72 of Inferno, M C Escher (1898–1972) was a brilliant graphic artist whose birthplace, the Dutch province of Friesland, gave its name to the kind of large-bodied horse that served as the model for the Horses of St Mark’s in Venice.

  ESFANDIARY, FEREIDOUN M The handsome Iranian man described in chapter 73 of Inferno, F M Esfandiary (1930–2000) was an early prophet of Transhumanism who changed his name to FM-2030 in the hope that he would celebrate his 100th birthday in 2030.

  FM-2030

  EUROPEAN CENTRE FOR DISEASE PREVENTION AND CONTROL Based in Stockholm, the ECDC ‘works in partnership with national health protection bodies across Europe to strengthen and develop continent-wide disease surveillance and early warning systems’. It does have a Surveillance and Response Support section, but there’s no record of it using miniature drone helicopters to shoot indiscriminately through museum windows.

  FAUKMAN, JONAS Robert Langdon’s New York-based editor. The name is a deft anagram of Dan Brown’s real-life ‘editor and close friend Jason Kaufman’.

  FERRIS, JONATHAN A fictional character wearing Plume Paris glasses in Dan Brown’s Inferno, Ferris apparently works for the World Health Organisation. But nothing is as simple as that.

  GULENSOY, GOKSEL The Turkish documentary filmmaker mentioned in cha
pter 84 of Inferno has devoted twenty years to filming the tunnels and cisterns under Hagia Sophia. Take a look at www.beneaththehagiasophia.com to see images, and read how delighted he is to find that his work has been mentioned by Dan Brown.

  GYPSY, THE Years of carrying her wares around St Mark’s Square in Venice have given the Gypsy strong arms that she puts to profitable use when, after some bargaining over the price, she agrees to haul a dark-haired man and a pretty young woman out of a narrow light well beneath the piazza.

  HARRIS TWEED A handwoven cloth from the Outer Hebrides, used to make the kind of well-tailored jackets favoured by Robert Langdon.

  HIRST, DAMIEN Like Robert Langdon, Dan Brown saw British artist Damien Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull, For The Love Of God, on display in the Palazzo Vecchio. Interviewed by Time magazine, Brown commented ‘I love the blend of the old and new, and Damien Hirst does that beautifully’. He also said that he’d be flattered to be spoken of in the same breath as Hirst.

  KENNEDY, JOHN F As Dan Brown acknowledges in chapter 38 of Inferno, the epigraph for his book – ‘the darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis’ – is not a genuine quotation from the Divine Comedy. It’s merely ‘derived from the work of Dante’, and, as explained on p.21, it does not accurately Dante’s depiction of Hell. It comes in fact from a speech delivered by President John F Kennedy (1917–63) in Germany, in June 1963: ‘Dante once said that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality’.

  KEYMEL, MARIELE The real and world-renowned pianist is described in Inferno as having given a spectacular concert of classical music in the Hall of the Five Hundred. True; during a year spent studying in Florence, Mariele Keymel (1951–2011) took part in a performance of Beethoven’s complete piano sonatas in the Palazzo Vecchio.

  KIER, DEB This character appears in the pages of Inferno as an owner services representative with NetJets, based in Columbus, Ohio. The company is real, with operations in North America, Europe and China, but it is not clear if Deb Kier is a real person or not.

  KLIMT, GUSTAV Seeing The Kiss, by the Viennese Symbolist painter Gustav Klimt (1862–1918), displayed in Venice’s Ca’ Pesaro, was responsible for arousing the American symbologist Robert Langdon’s lifelong gusto for modern art. Though Langdon does not say so, the theme of a couple embraced in a kiss associates the painting with Rodin’s sculpture, The Kiss, which was inspired by the characters of Paolo and Francesca in Dante’s Inferno.

  KNOWLTON, LAURENCE Described in Dan Brown’s Inferno as a senior facilitator for the Consortium aboard its headquarters yacht the Mendacium, Knowlton is a fictional character whose task is to release Zobrist’s video to the world, but alarm bells go off when he previews it.

  KURZWEIL, RAY Credited with developing the first OCR – optical character recognition – software in the 1970s, Ray Kurzweil is a real person who is also a leading advocate of Transhumanism in general, and especially, as described in Chapter Thirteen of this book, of the idea that humanity is approaching the ‘Singularity’, the sudden and irreversible moment in which artificial intelligence exceeds human brain power for the first time. As of 2013, he’s director of engineering at Google, tasked with transforming the Google search engine into a ‘cybernetic friend’.

  Ray Kurzweil - the man at the heart of actual Transhumanism..

  LANGDON, ROBERT A Harvard professor of religious iconology and symbology, Langdon is the fictional hero of four Dan Brown novels. Even when being shot at and chased round Florence he finds the time to describe paintings, churches and the like, though perhaps because of a childhood mishap, when he fell down a well, his descriptions are not always accurate.

  LONGFELLOW, HENRY WADSWORTH As described in chapter 18 of Inferno, New England’s famous Fireside Poet (1807–82) published the first American translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy in 1867, and founded the Dante Society of America the year before his death. In Matthew Pearl’s 2003 novel, The Dante Club, Longfellow and his fellow poets use their Dantean expertise to unmask a serial killer.

  Fireside Poet and translator of Dante, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

  MACHIAVELLI, NICCOLÓ The Fiorentine politician whose name is a byword for double-dealing, Niccoló Machiavelli (1469–1527) wrote his most famous work, The Prince, after being removed from power by the Medici. The quotation cited by Elizabeth Sinskey in chapter 22 of Inferno comes from his Discourses on Livy, and reads in full: ‘When every province of the world so teems with inhabitants that they can neither subsist where they are nor remove themselves elsewhere, every region being equally crowded and over-peopled, and when human craft and wickedness have reached their highest peak, it must needs come about that the world will purge itself in one or another of these three ways, to the end that men, becoming few and contrite, may amend their lives and live with more convenience.’ The three ways in question are very much the Malthusian checks described in Chapter Seven of this book: floods, plagues and famines.

  MARCONI, ENRICO The doctor who appears at the beginning of Inferno where he is working with Dr Sienna Brooks in the hospital where Robert Langdon regains consciousness. He is fictional in more ways than one.

  MALTHUS, THOMAS ROBERT The life and work of Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) forms the subject of Chapter Seven of this book.

  MCKENNITT, LOREENA One of Robert Langdon’s favourite living recording artists, the Canadian harpist, accordionist and pianist Loreena McKennitt, mentioned in chapter 15 of Inferno, wrote a song called ‘Dante’s Prayer’. A karaoke version is available on Karaoke Pop Hits volume 69.

  MENDACIUM, THE A key component of the Consortium’s ingenious strategy to remain inconspicuous, the Mendacium is a gigantic yacht, owned by a man known as the provost, which sails around the Mediterranean looking like a futuristic warship. Nor does its name give anything away, unless you realise that mendacium comes from the Latin for lie or fiction.

  MIRSAT The fictional curator of the Hagia Sophia, the sixth-century church-mosque-museum in Istanbul, which he specially opens after hours for Langdon in his search for the doomsday device.

  OPPENHEIMER, J. ROBERT In chapter 15 of Inferno, Sienna Brooks quotes J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–67), the ‘Father of the Atomic Bomb’, as saying ‘I am Vishnu, destroyer of worlds’ when he witnessed the first A-bomb test on July 16 1945. The correct quotation, from the Bhagavad Gita, is ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’, and Oppenheimer himself later wrote that he only remembered the words, he didn’t actually say them.

  Professor J. Robert Oppenheimer (right) with General Leslie Groves, military head of the Manhattan Project, which developed the Atomic Bomb.

  PIMPONI, MAURIZIO The skipper of the boat in which Langdon, Sienna and Ferris zip along the Grand Canal in Venice, his character is perhaps based on the ‘peerless’ Maurizio Pimponi credited by Dan Brown in his acknowledgements.

  POPULATION APOCALYPSE EQUATION In chapter 41 of Inferno, Sienna Brooks describes Bertrand Zobrist as a proponent of the Population Apocalypse Equation, which is said to be a mathematical recognition that thanks to overpopulation we are facing the apocalyptic collapse of society. There is no such equation. Search for it online, however, and you’ll find all sorts of conspiracy theorists who allege that President Obama’s director for counterterrorism wrote a master’s thesis on the Apocalypse Equation, which argued that the US government should instigate a ‘planned and controlled genocide’ in the face of declining fossil fuel reserves. There’s no evidence that such a thesis exists either. Pacifist Bradford Lyttle published an Apocalypse Equation in the 1980s, but that, like the Doomsday Clock, centred on the possibility of nuclear war or conflagration.

  PLUME PARIS The European-influenced brand of glasses worn by Jonathan Ferris. As the Florida-based company’s website makes clear, the glasses are available in 22 different styles, in order to satisfy whatever the wearer has in mind, and, significantly, feature unique temple
designs. Some are made out of Zyl to achieve beautiful colours, while others are made with Stainless Steel Metal.

  PORTINARI, BEATRICE For the full story of Beatrice Portinari (1266–90), the great idealised love of Dante’s life, see Chapter Two. As Dan Brown describes, her ‘simple sepulchre has become a pilgrimage destination for both Dante fans and heartsick lovers alike’.

  PROVOST, THE Head of the Consortium and owner of the yacht Mendacium, he offers invisibility to anyone with the money.

  RODIN, AUGUSTE The French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) is mentioned in chapter 15 of Inferno as having created the sculpture The Three Shades. It’s an interesting story. Rodin did a monumental sculpture of the Gates of Hell, whose 186 figures were inspired by Dante’s Inferno. The figures later emerged as separate sculptures, among them The Three Shades, The Thinker and his famous The Kiss. See page 71 of this book for more about The Kiss.

  RUSSO, ERNESTO The Pitti Palace security guard who is treated to an example of Sienna Brooks’ mastery of dim mak.

  SERACINI, MAURIZIO The now-famous art diagnostician who spotted Vasari’s hidden message on the Battle of Marciano in the Palazzo Veccio – ‘Cerca Trova’ – Maurizio Seracini crops up twice in Inferno, and also figured in The Da Vinci Code.

  SHADE, THE Dan Brown’s Inferno opens with a mysterious figure who calls himself the Shade running through the predawn streets of Florence. To escape capture he leaps from the spire of the Badia, leaving behind what he calls his gift to mankind, otherwise known as Inferno. After a number of twists and turns and clues, the Shade turns out to be … but you will have to read the book.

  The French sculptor Auguste Rodin photographed in 1893.

  SINSKEY, ELIZABETH The World Health Organisation is real, but the character of Elizabeth Sinskey, its director in Dan Brown’s novel, is fiction. But there are fictions within fictions in Inferno, and it takes some time for the reader to appreciate the truth about Sinskey, and for her to discover the truth about herself.