As I crossed the English Channel on the Eurostar, public fever over The Da Vinci Code was at its peak. Right across London, posters, billboards, buses enticed the onlooker to explore the trail. Even the sleek Eurostar sported on its body Da Vinci’s enigmatic ‘Mona Lisa’ along with strange cryptograms.

While Da Vinci caught the popular imagination, I was busy absorbing another Renaissance master: Michelangelo. The British Museum has a special exhibition on Michelangelo featuring among other exciting works one of his cartoons. With impressions of Michelangelo’s fallen angels, the pensive brow of God and the outstretched hand in the creation of Adam swarming in my head, I encountered ‘Mona Lisa’ at the Louvre. Hordes of Japanese tourists had descended on the La Jaconda to retrace the footsteps of Dan Brown’s Professor Langdon and Sophie Neveu. Seeing me unimpressed by the greatness of the world’s most famous painting, a young assistant launched into an explanation of the finer aspects of the work. While she was extolling Da Vinci’s genius, Michelangelo continued to leave me wonderstruck!

It was interestingly the overpowering effect of Da Vinci’s ‘Madonna of the Rocks’ and the incomplete ‘Adoration of the Magi’ that changed things. It struck me then that I, too, was on a quest — not of the Holy Grail, but on a more personal one: trying to figure out who was the greater: Leonardo Da Vinci or Michelangelo Buonarroti? Rome came next. I finally set eyes on the frescoes at the Sistine Chapel. Nothing quite prepared me for the sheer magnificence of the ceiling and the elaborate altarpiece with the ‘Last Judgement’. It was his ‘David’ which gave me a glimpse into Michelangelo’s perfection as a sculptor. But wait. This quest was leaving me with more riddles than answers. What about Da Vinci’s sketches of the ‘Vitruvian Man’ symbolising the perfect proportions of the human body?

In Florence, braving the serpentine queues at the Galleria Del Accademia was worth it. The museum was holding a special exhibition on Leonardo: ‘The Mind of A Genius’. His self-portrait in red chalk beckoned me to discover more about a man considered far ahead of his times. The arc had been completed. I had started my trail in London with a special exhibition on one artist and stumbled on to the genius of another by the time I concluded it.

Did I crack the code? Who was the greater genius? Experts had concluded that the painter of ‘Mona Lisa’ was greater, but I cannot choose between them!