The Mona Lisa

The Mona Lisa, also known as La Gioconda or La Joconde, is an early 16th century work by Leonardo da Vinci. It is on permanent display in The Louvre museum in Paris. It is an oil painting on poplar wood, and 30 x 20 inches in size.

Due to a documented margin note found in 2005, we know that the model is called Lisa Gherardini, from an Italian farming family.

She has no visible eyebrows nor eyelashes, but the latter may have disappeared due to over-cleaning. The landscape behind her is imaginary. It is an early example of sfumato, where light and shade are blended together to give a smoky appearance rather than using hard lines.

In 1911, it was stolen, with Pablo Picasso among the suspects. People still queued up to look at the blank space where it used to hang. It was found two years later in the possession of Vincenzo Perugia, an Italian-born Louvre employee who was trying to repatriate the painting.

Over the years, attackers have hurled acid, red paint, a rock and a teacup at it. It is currently behind bulletproof glass to deter vandals.

In 1919, Marcel Duchamp created the parody ‘L.H.O.O.Q’., which roughly means ‘she has a hot ass’ in French when the letters are said aloud. It is a postcard of the Mona Lisa with a moustache and goatee beard added in pencil. A version by Salvador Dali replaces the model’s face with his
own.

Butterflies and Moths

A person who studies butterflies and moths is a lepidopterist. There are 17,500 species of butterfly, but nine times more moths. It is once (wrongly) thought that butterflies liked the taste of dairy food.

The four life stages are egg, caterpillar, pupa and adult. The butterfly pupa lives inside a chrysalis made from dried skin, while moths mature inside cocoons. ‘Caterpillar’ comes from the Old French word for ‘hairy cat’. The world’s largest butterfly is Queen Alexandra's birdwing from Papua New Guinea, which has a wingspan of over 27cm (11in).

The species Uraba lugens stacks its previously-shed heads on top of each other to deter predators. For the same reason, the comma butterfly has comma-shaped markings on the underside of its wing, while the owl butterfly has markings that look like eyes.

Adult butterflies feed on liquids, usually nectar, by sucking through their long proboscis which acts like a straw. As they don’t eat solids, there is no need to defecate. Butterflies drink the tears of crocodiles and related animals to obtain salt. Butterflies have taste sensors on their feet, allowing them to see if the leaf they are standing on is edible for their caterpillars.

Henri Charrière’s book ‘Papillon’ (1970) is the true story of the author’s escape from a penal colony in French Guiana, after a wrongful murder conviction. The title comes from the French word for butterfly, after a butterfly tattoo on his chest. When the creator of the Scout movement, Robert Baden-Powell, was working as a spy in the Balkans, he disguised a sketch of a fort as a butterfly.

The nervous feeling of ‘butterflies in the stomach’ occurs due to blood being redirected to the muscles. Buddleia plants are colloquially called butterfly bushes due to its attractiveness to butterflies and insects generally.

Mazes and Labyrinths

The term ‘maze’ or ‘labyrinth’ can be used for any confusing or elaborate system of pathways. Labyrinths have one path that winds around in various directions (i.e. you can’t get lost), whereas mazes have a choice of route. If a maze can be solved by placing one hand on the wall and walking forwards to the only exit, it is called ‘simply connected’. If the maze has islands of walls that do not connect with others, it cannot be solved this way and is therefore ‘multiply connected’.

In Greek myth, a half-man half-bull Minotaur is imprisoned in a maze designed by Daedalus on the orders of King Minos. The king’s daughter, Ariadne, falls in love with Theseus and gives him a ball of thread which he uses solve the maze after killing the Minotaur. The ball of string, a ‘clew’, is the etymology for a ‘clue’ to solving a puzzle.

In Egyptian times, mazes up to 3,000 rooms in size were used to keep looters away from tombs of the rich and famous. A famous 13th century labyrinth, perhaps an allusion to the path to salvation, can be seen in the nave of Chartres Cathedral. Turf mazes – where a labyrinthine path is cut out of grass – can be found throughout Europe; they are mentioned in Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream’ (“quaint mazes in the wanton green”).

The original puzzle maze still exists at Hampton Court Palace in south-west London. Made from hornbeam trees (now yew), it was designed in the 1690s for King William III to entertain guests. Research student Willard Small used the palace’s maze as the template when designing the very first ‘rodent maze’ in a science experiment.

The artwork Labyrinth by Mark Wallinger consists of 270 different labyrinths, one positioned at every London Underground train station. The twisty, inner cavities of the ear can suffer from a condition called labyrinthitis when inflamed.

Syndicated  by Knight Features