Mona Lisa is really Mrs. Gioconda

New information on the Mona Lisa, my favorite painting and my favorite subject of parody:

The Lede: Mona Lisa’s Identity, Solved for Good?



So Vasari's identification of her as "Mrs. Giocondo, whose maiden name was Gherardini" is now substantiated from a much older source. Her husband was "a wealthy silk merchant in Florence" and her smiling face -- giving her the nickname "La Gioconda" -- is really a reference to her name

From "The Future Eaters"

"The European history of the colonisation of Australia has followed the same pattern as has the history of all of the colonists of the 'new' lands. All have arrived at what they are convinced is a virgin land. All have found resources that have never before been tapped, and all have experienced a short period of tremendous boom, when people were bigger and better than before, and when resources seemed so limitless that there was no need to fight for them. Because the was enough for everyone, egalitarian, carefree societies with the leisure to achieve great things, have prospered. There was a period of optimism, when people imagined great futures for their nations. Inevitably however, each group has found that the resource base is not limitless. Each has experienced a period when the competition for shrinking resources becomes sharper. The struggle between people increases, whether it be a class struggle or a struggle between tribes. If people survive long enough, they eventually come into equilibrium with their newly impoverished land -- and their lifestyles are ultimately dictated by the number of renewable resources that their ancestors have left them." (Flannery, The Future Eaters, page 344)

Australians today still reflect the love of the frontier, which characterized this early and super-optimistic time. The photos show our hosts on our first trip to Canberra. We went to the Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve for a picnic, where emus -- as shown lurking in the picnic grounds -- tried to eat our lunch. The destructive cycle of Australian climate has unfortunately taken its toll: major forest fires destroyed some or all of this park several years after our visit. According to Flannery, the cause of these major fires is the cessation by Europeans of the Aborigines' forest management through controlled burning to maintain a brushless forest floor.

Future Eaters

The Future Eaters by Tim Flannery has been around since 1994, but I just read it this week. One of our excellent tour guides in New Zealand last month recommended it. "Future eaters," in the definition of the book, are people who kill the large animals, cut down the trees, and destroy their environment. The Polynesians went from island to island doing that -- but they always found another island. Implicitly, our current situation is that we have run out of "islands."

My experience in New Zealand inspired fascination for its bird life and the landscape. I also was intrigued by the short history of the Maori, who -- I learned -- arrived in impressive sea-going boats only within the last thousand years. Before that visit to NZ, I had very little idea of the geography or the natural history there. I had heard that the Maori people were very warlike, and had farmed much of the two islands. Similarly on my two visits to Australia (in the 1990s) and subsequent reading projects, I had formed a brief impression of the much longer duration of the Aboriginal habitation of the Australian continent and how they adapted to its unusual climate and ecology before the total disruption of European colonialism. My knowledge was multiplied by this book.

The Future Eaters starts with the age of dinosaurs on the amalgamated southern landmass that included Antarctica, South America, Australia, New Zealand, and many of the surrounding islands. Flannery describes the rising and falling seas, the migrating and separating continents, and the evolving marsupials, placental mammals, reptiles, birds. Finally we come to the eventual arrival of the little hairy ape -- a tool-using predator that changed virtually every aspect of the Australian continent. Every chapter of the book seemed to answer some question that I had had in mind.

I was fascinated by the Polynesian experience -- discovering an island, establishing settlements, then frequently exhausting the resources, extinguishing the most useful species, and destroying plant life and other life. The most extreme case discussed is Easter Island, where every tree was cut down, and the human population -- unable to make canoes in which to escape -- starved and dwindled almost to extinction themselves. (Jared Diamond makes use of this same example in the much more recent book Collapse.)

The Maoris, another example of "future eating," arrived in NZ with a few possessions and little hunting technology. They found a number of species of delicious, huge, nearly tame birds: the moas. Within a few hundred years they had eaten every one, as well as extinguishing a few other species, destroying some of the forests, and creating an erosion disaster. They then were forced to adapt to a changed and denuded land. Just a few hundred years later, when the Europeans arrived, the Maori had developed extremely warlike behavior, including cannibalism, in response to hard times. The book tells this story in great and fascinating detail, all to my surprise.

In a few places humans established an equilibrium with the environment. Pre-European Australians, Flannery established, managed the meager resources of the continent for 60,000 years. Although on first arrival they seem to have driven the largest animals to extinction, after a while they established a steady state for the land. They selectively burned the forests, enabling regrowth in a remarkably sustainable way. They established religious practices that protected species -- such as maintaining some land areas as no-go, effectively using them as breeding grounds for species that would otherwise have been used up. The balance of humans and their surroundings turns out to have been amazing. A brief mention of ancient Aboriginal art works -- mainly unexplored at the time the book was written -- makes me really hope to learn more, as I had no idea that such artifacts existed.

The saddest part of the book documents the arrival of the Europeans and their terrible misues of both humans and the environment. Flannery is passionate in his condemnation of the worst of this, especially the inhumanity of the treatment of the natives, including vicious massacres. Although he condemns the excesses, he also points out how impossible it was for the settlers, transported convicts, and other early arrivals to understand the big picture.

Flannery's final point is a long series of advisory suggestions to the Australians about how to manage their resources now. This for me is the least interesting part of the book: fortunately it is only the last 50 or so pages of the 400. I enjoyed reading this book very much.

Other books treat the general subjects related to the issues in The Future Eaters. Some of these books are among my favorite reading including:

• Jared Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel and Collapse treat much the same subject matter but from a global, rather than an Australia-New Zealand perspective.
• Charles C. Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus discusses the impact of Europeans on the Americas.
• Not that I've read them recently, but some of the books of Stephen Jay Gould contain related discussions of the process of evolution.

Happy New Year

The clock struck 12! Then the snow started. And it snowed all night.

Favorites from 2007

Here are my favorite posts that I wrote in 2007 about my Shakespeare reading project:
Claudius the Evil King
Reading "The Merchant of Venice"
Shakespeare in the Arb
Shakespeare: Reduced and Censored

My favorites about traveling:
The Sacred Well (Chichen Itza, Mexico)
Cherry Blossoms in Washington, D.C.
Palermo Sunday Flea Market,
Skipped by the Hurricane and Diving (Kona, Hawaii)
The Army 10-Miler (Washington, DC)
Kaifeng in Toronto
A little about Middle Earth, (Wellington, NZ)

And my favorite posts on food history -- from my food blog:
Mona Lisa: By Request: What did Mona Lisa Eat?
What would you serve to Queen Elizabeth?
Two Books: "Paradox of Plenty" and "Hungering for America
What if global warming makes our crops fail?
What did Columbus Discover?

New Year's Resolutions

Last year my resolution was to review my very obsolete knowledge of Shakespeare. Through the year, I read several plays, watched recordings, saw one live performance, and read some history and criticism. I summarized much of my reading on this blog. Today: one more play, Much Ado About Nothing, which we watched in the 1993 version by Kenneth Branagh. It's highly enjoyable. Sometimes I think Shakespeare liked to try out the same ideas as both comedy and tragedy. All the tragic-leaning events here are so easily corrected.

So far, I plan a completely different resolution this year: to try to use less packaging; that is, bring my own shopping bags and whatever else I can think of to reduce waste. This seems a little too unambitious, but it's all I have thought of so far.

Video of the Gulls

The gull colony we saw on Kapiti Island (near Wellington, New Zealand) was incredibly noisy as the gulls really wanted us to go away!

Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield was born in this house on October 14, 1888. Location: 25 Tinakori Road, Thorndon, Wellington, New Zealand.

Two or three siblings, her grandmother, parents, and an aunt all lived in approximately 8 rooms: 4 bedrooms, a "night nursery," a parlor, a living room, another sitting room, a kitchen, and a bath that was sort of a lean-to. Several servants seem to also have been there, if not actually living there. I think all restored Victorian homes make one realize how very much space we expect for modern living!

Like many author's homes, this one is privately owned, and was rescued from a decayed state and restored by a group of dedicated volunteers just in time to avoid total destruction. Many furnishings are typical of the era -- rather than specific to the family. Scraps of original wallpaper, discovered behind paneling or heavy layers of other wall coverings, allowed restoration of some rooms by use of reproductions.

The family soon moved to another house nearby. It was grander -- but in the 1960s, was torn down to make a motorway, which runs past the otherwise peaceful back garden here.

I think the story "The Garden Party" takes place in that home, and that the poor and run-down neighborhood nearby was perhaps in the ravine where the motorway now runs. But maybe not. Real experts probably have mapped the entire opus onto Wellington and nearby towns where the family spent time at the seaside (and thus where other stories are set). In reading one book of stories during the trip, I was quite intrigued at the parallels to today's city and the memories taking place almost exactly a century ago.

Why is this interesting? Well, quite a few of Katherine Mansfield's stories deal with her childhood memories. Obviously, relevant quotations from the stories are available to anyone touring the house, supplied on laminated pages that you carry along on your self-guided tour. You can't help becoming interested!

Family photos on display in virtually every room in the house show the way the family members all looked during the time they lived in the house. A photo shows the grandmother holding a baby who had just died -- a long quote describes Katherine Mansfield's childhood memory of the sad event -- including the arrival of the photographer. Certainly this underscores how times have changed in a century.

One famous Mansfield story is called "The Doll's House." It begins as the children of the family are looking over this new plaything. Of course the management had to have a dolls' house on display. The one they have is designed to match the words in the story. However, it's entirely modern -- in my own doll house I have exactly the same living room furniture. Victorian style furniture is probably the most popular choice for recent collectors. Nevertheless, it's an enjoyable thing to see.

Here is how Mansfield wrote about the children of the family opening the house:

"The hook at the side was stuck fast. Pat pried it open with his pen- knife, and the whole house-front swung back, and-there you were, gazing at one and the same moment into the drawing-room and dining-room, the kitchen and two bedrooms. That is the way for a house to open! Why don't all houses open like that? How much more exciting than peering through the slit of a door into a mean little hall with a hat-stand and two umbrellas! That is-isn't it? -- what you long to know about a house when you put your hand on the knocker. Perhaps it is the way God opens houses at dead of night when He is taking a quiet turn with an angel. . ."

Somehow, seeing Katherine Mansfield's birthplace has a strange similarity to looking into the all-revealing doll house. You know so much more than you would if you really visited a real, living family.

More Spirals

I've mentioned that the Maori found the spiral form of the opening fern -- called the koru -- to be a powerful image, which they used in many forms in their art. And that it has become a kind of national image for New Zealand. Since my earlier post, I've been seeing more and more of these images. Near the Botanic Garden one was embedded in the sidewalk:
This is a particularly old wood carving from pre-European-contact Maori art:

Whales

Today is December 18 in New Zealand -- it's still yesterday in Michigan. It's our last day here, and we spent several hours in Te Papa, the national museum. We especially liked a wonderful exhibit on whales. The museum includes material on natural history, the history of both Maori and English settlement of the land, and on the art and culture of Maori people, Europeans, and the people of Oceania. The whale exhibit included materials on all of these subjects.

The natural history part of the whale exhibit displayed whale skeletons and fossils. Whale family trees explained relationships among the large number of families and species of whales -- large and small. Some whales eat small things by sifting the ocean through their baleen, and some gulp deep-water fish and squids, eating them whole. Research into whale behavior, whale songs, and whale capabilities (such as diving deep) are ongoing, and scientists have much to learn, it appears. Because New Zealand presents a long coastline and is alone in the uninterrupted ocean, many many whales have always beached here -- currently, this provides a large research opportunity. When beached whales die, scientists can study them.

The Maori people have legends about the whale rider, Paikea. Whales did his bidding. He was the first of his people to arrive in New Zealand because he could ride a whale, while the others had only canoes, says the story. While Maori people did not hunt whales, they used the beached whales for food. Great carvers, they made beautiful artifacts from whalebone and teeth. Now, the Maori are involved in efforts to rescue beached whales which still have a chance to return to the ocean. When the whales die, the Maori people give the whale a name before the scientists take it away; some of the whale teeth and bones also go to modern Maori carvers. Non-Maori New Zealanders also participate in efforts to rescue beached whales.

After initial contact between Europeans and Maori by Abel Tasman and Captain Cook, the main European presence for quite a while was the whalers -- ships from Europe and New England. This contact was also documented in the exhibit. Sailors sometimes came onshore for a while -- or totally deserted ship and made a life with the Maori or the few European agricultural settlements. Some Maori people today can trace their family back to sailors who intermarried into the local population.

New Zealand was thus a whaling country for over a century. Now they are totally committed to saving whales and opposing whaling. They are against hunting or harming other whale species such as dolphins. They promote the whale-watching and dolphin-watching offerings in Kaikoura, where we visited a few days ago.

No photos were allowed in the exhibit.

The Weka

The weka doesn't know that it is an extremely unusual bird, so it walks around on the ground right in front of the tourists. One weka has its territory on the front porch of the hostel where we had lunch. John, the host, has to keep a barrier in front of his sliding glass doors to keep the weka from coming into the living room. These birds are about the size of a barnyard hen.

A Gull Colony on Kapiti Island

We saw a number of native birds besides these gulls, including the large, flightless (and rather clueless) weka, the bellbird, the NZ robin, the tui, spoonbills, wood pigeons, another pukeko, whitehead, and others.

A little about Middle Earth

First, here is our guide Todd Rippon, of our tour company: Flat Earth New Zealand Experiences. Todd said we could use this image from his website. We admit, he didn't do the tour in costume. In fact, no one is allowed to use the costumes from the films, and all the sites that we visited have substantially been restored to their original condition. As a result you realize the vision that Peter Jackson had when he realized that a city park could be the scary site of the dark riders, an ordinary riverbed could be transformed to Rivendell, a gravel quarry could turn into Helm's Deep, site of a major battle between Orcs and good guys, and so on. (Note: today's guide to the wildlife refuge was a good guy in that battle.)

Here are a few images.

Frodo and the other hobbits hid near these trees in a city park overlooking a quiet Wellington neighborhood. The neighbors called the fire department when smoke and bright lights from the filming alarmed them.
This bridge on a quiet historic English-style estate became the magical bridge to Galandriel's magic land. Embellished with bentwood decorations, it was the site of her farewell to Frodo. Later, the same pond was used to film the scene where Smeagol (later Gollum) kills his cousin to get the ring that was on the bottom of the river.

Gandalf and Saruman walked on this very spot with their staffs.

More of Len's Dolphins

The Pukeko

The pukeko is a rail-like New Zealand bird, which we saw on our tour of the Martinborough area last Wednesday. Despite all the imported predators, it seems remarkable how many native birds are still common and just wandering about the fields and woodlands here.

Karori Wildlife Sanctuary

This afternoon at the wildlife sanctuary we were pleased to see the Kaka -- New Zealand parrot. We actually saw several of them quite close up, because we arrived at feeding time. Other birds we saw included the fantail, the NZ robin, the tui, and a NZ scaup on the reservoir. Non-natives included a chaffinch and a California quail family, including chicks.

We also took a very long walk along paths where we hadn't walked before, as well as the same paths we had seen on our evening tour. We managed to spot two tuatara and several weta.

"Tuatara are the only living members of an ancient order of reptiles that evolved around 220 million years ago. These reptiles died out everywhere except in New Zealand." says the wildlife website. See Fact about the tuatara.

By releasing them and protecting them, the sanctuary is helping reestablish this species, which was harmed by imported predators. Each one wears a little beaded collar, color coded to identify the individual. Though they are carefully watched and protected, these rare animals are still considered to be living and breeding in the wild.

The weta is a very large insect. They live in various parts of the sanctuary, most impressively within an abandoned gold mining shaft that dates from an unsuccessful gold rush in 19th century Wellington. Lenny photographed one on the fence that separates the various kinds of wildlife from endangering one another.

Native Wildlife: South Island

We saw this albatross from the dolphin watching boat. We saw huge numbers of dolphins all around the boat, and loved watching them jump and dive.

The paradise duck and the shag (cormorant) are two other birds we enjoyed seeing. I'll add more. We saw but didn't photograph a little blue penguin, and also saw shearwaters, petrels, and many others.

Lenny took all the above photos with his new SLR camera. I took this one of a NZ fur seal on a beach near Kaikoura.

Little Airplanes

Thursday and Friday we took small planes, a scenic train, a boat, and many car transfers on a trip from Wellington (last photo) to Kaikoura on the south island here in New Zealand. We stopped for a while at Picton (in middle photo). Later, I'll post some photos of the dolphins and sea birds we saw from the boat. Unfortunately, we were not able to see whales because the cloud cover was so low that our smallest airplane had to turn back.

Here is one thing I discovered, but could not photograph: the enormous tree ferns that are an important part of the forest here are very noticeable from the air. They look like bright green stars.

Wildlife Sanctuary

Sunday night we heard the call of the Little-spotted Kiwi -- very exotic. We heard the tui bird -- a mimic with many cries As darkness fell, the daytime birds grew quiet, and we heard an owl that says "mo pork" and also the kiwis. We didn't hear the native frogs, as it turns out that they have no voice boxes; however, we were told by our guide that many frogs are in the sanctuary.

We also didn't hear the numerous extinct birds that once populated this very strange land. The huge birds like the moa and the adze bill are only remembered in reconstructions in the display cases of the museum.

We saw a weta-- a cricket like insect, and a white cormorant on a nest in the reservoir in the center of the sanctuary. Most amazing were the blue glow-worms in the hillsides and banks of the streams. The intense light from these creatures, though very tiny, creates the illusion that the landscape is covered with points of light. Because the trails are very steep, the glow worms were both beside us and deep below us.

The sanctuary where we saw all this is inside a huge fenced area that prevents predators ( i.e. mammals) from eating the rare native birds that have been reintroduced here. The fence is a tour de force of engineering and animal behavior research. The developers studied how mice could climb past many types of barrier, how opossums (the worst enemy of native birds) could give one another rides to the top, and get over a variety of barriers, and how vigilant the 400 volunteers need to be to ensure that there are no gaps. The photo shows the fence. Unfortunately, we didn't have time to figure out what we would need to do to photograph the glow worms, or if that's even possible.

We learned a lot on our 2 hour hike -- all in a penetrating rain. The only mammals originally native to NZ were a few species of bat; all the other niches were filled by birds of extreme types, most extreme being the moa and adze bill I think. Introduced mammals have destroyed large numbers of species here, and the sanctuary is reintroducing some that have only bred on islands since the arrival of the Europeans.

Our guide looked exactly like Pipi Longstocking: two red curls sticking out perpendicular to her head, and a turned up nose. And a total NZ accent -- she calls it a fince, not a fence. The other guide, Tony, could imitate all the bird cries in an uncanny way. Tony hates possums more than anyone I can imagine. He seemed appalled when we said they live in our back yard. The managers of the sanctuary hate possums so much they have a possum graveyard where we walked on the burial area of hundreds of them, and I think the guides hoped we would dance on it.

New Zealand Government Center

The architecture of the parliament building in Wellington presents some serious contrasts. The earliest parliament building is now the law school of Victoria University. (It's near the site of this photo, but not pictured here.)

The next building to be built is a Victorian wedding-cake type building, all pink with flourishes. (At right.) Next to it is a serious and heavy building from the early 20th century, with classical columns and gravitas.

When the existing buildings became too small, in the late 60s, a very independent-minded architecture minister planned and then built "the beehive." Today, cabinet ministers and high executives have offices in it -- the top floor is the offices of the Prime Minister. The ensemble is startling, to say the least. When the design styles of the 60s and 70s become more classic, the beehive will probably look better: right now, I'd say it's rather dated.

Across the street from Parliament -- and on the direct route which leads from our hotel to almost everywhere else -- is a pub called The Backbencher: The House with No Peers. I'm hoping to have a beer there before we leave, as I am a lover of puns, myself.

Beer, incidentally, is very popular here. A brewery called Mac's, down on the waterfront, attracted quite a crowd on Saturday -- several conference attendees arranged a meeting place there. So I guess it's also "in" with the parliamentarians.