The mystery of Mona Lisa
QUESTION
There is a bridge and large body of water in the background of the Mona Lisa painting. Is this a real place?
THE nature of the landscapes in the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci have long been debated. Most art historians believe they combine reality and fantasy.
In the background of the Mona Lisa, painted between 1503 and 1506, it’s clear that da Vinci is toying with perspective, presenting it from a bird’s-eye view.
People of Arezzo in the Val di Chiana, a valley in Tuscany, maintain their landscape is depicted in the Mona Lisa.
There is sound evidence for this. Among his many talents, da Vinci was a pioneering cartographer and is known to have mapped a great lake in the valley, which may be the one in the picture.
His map shows a large lake north to south in the valley. It’s been surmised that he assembled a series of imagined aerial vistas and sequenced them with his map to create the landscape.
The present-day appearance of the Val di Chiana is quite different to da Vinci’s time. Land reclamation over the centuries has left two small remnants of the original lake, Chiusi and Montepulciano, linked by the Passo alla Querce canal. The fragment of a bridge depicted in the painting is said to be Ponte Buriano, a spectacular seven-arch stone bridge completed in 1277, that crosses the River Arno at Arezzo.
However, this is not universally accepted. In 2011, Italian art historian Carla Glori identified it as the Ponte Vecchio (old bridge) in the medieval town of Bobbio.
Also known as Ponte Gobbo (humpback bridge) or Ponte del Diavolo (devil’s bridge), Glori contends that the arch on the right is damaged, which reflects the state of the bridge in 1472.
Various other theories have been proffered by art historians. Some have suggested da Vinci was depicting Lake Iseo in the Italian Alps, which explains the snowcapped mountains.
Da Vinci left us with a puzzle that may never be answered, only adding to the mystery and splendour of his work.
Carrie Woods, Cambridge.
QUESTION
When was it that Elvis Presley was first called The King?
EARLY promoters used colourful phrases in their advertising to describe Elvis, including ‘Hillbilly Cat’, ‘Memphis Flash’ and ‘Atomic Powered Singer’.
It wasn’t until his popularity flourished following his 1956 national TV appearances and the release of Heartbreak Hotel that reporters began associating him with royalty.
The earliest known reference to Elvis as The King comes from the Waco News Tribune in 1956, when reporter Bea Ramirez described him as ‘the 21-year-old king of the nation’s rock ’n’ roll set’.
The following day, in The Daily Oklahoman, writer Jack Jones described Elvis as ‘a king of the teenaged cats’.
Writing in the Memphis PressScimitar, Robert Johnson anointed Elvis Presley with the title ‘king of rock ’n’ roll’.
On May 4, 1956, he described the audience reaction to an early Las Vegas appearance at the Frontier Hotel. In noting the more adult crowd wasn’t overwhelmed by Elvis’s performance, Johnson wrote: ‘The applause was scattered. A cold audience and the fledgling king of rock ’n’ roll was in a foreign land.’ Elvis was unhappy that he was called The King.
During a Press conference following his opening in Las Vegas in 1969, he pronounced Fats Domino the real king of rock ’n’ roll. When people called him The King, he would respond with the words: ‘The only king is Jesus.’
Mark Finch, Maidenhead.
QUESTION
When were drugs first made illegal in Ireland?
THE first serious attempt to ban drugs in Ireland was made with the 1977 Misuse of Drugs Act.
Drugs had started to come into popular use during the 1960s. The Act was the first to define the penalties for the unlawful production, possession and supply of drugs. Before it came into existence, there had been penalties available to the authorities for prosecuting people with drugs, under a customs Act that dated back to 1876, but this was used on an intermittent basis. The 1977 Act was the first serious attempt to suppress the trade in drugs.
When it was introduced, drugs had been a major social problem since the early 1970s, as more and more young people started using psychedlic drugs like LSD and cannabis. By the time the Act came into force, heroin use was becoming prevalent in inner-city areas of Dublin and, to a much lesser extent, Cork.
But no sooner had the 1977 Act been enacted than the drugs problem began to change significantly, in terms of both its nature and its magnitude.
In 1979, there was a dramatic increase in the supply of heroin to western Europe, following the overthrow of the Shah in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. By the early 1980s, the number of heroin users in Dublin grew significantly, although while Dublin became a major centre of heroin addiction, heroin addicts were few and far between in the rest of the country.
The government of the time set up a special task force on drug abuse in April, 1983, but it achieved little. New legislation was signed into law in 1984, the second Misuse of Drugs Act, which provided for far stiffer penalties than the 1977 legislation. Despite the 1984 law, the problem of drug abuse became so serious that many local community groups in Dublin became active in trying to persuade drug dealers to leave their areas.
In 1984, these local groups united under the banner ‘Concerned Parents Against Drugs’.
The HIV/Aids epidemic also arrived in Ireland and by 1986, the Department of Health found that 30% of intravenous drug users were HIV positive.
Three years later, in 1989, the first needle exchange opened.
In the earlier years of this century, head shops became widespread although many of the products sold by them were made illegal when the 2010 Criminal Justice (Psychoactive Substances) Act became law. This legislation was updated in 2015, with a new Misuse of Drugs Act, the third Act with that title.
The various Acts of the Oireachtas since 1977 with their various amendments and regulations, have tried to keep the cap on the drugs trade for the past 40 years, with regular substantial seizures by the gardaí and customs.
It’s all a big change from the pre-1977 situation, when there was no effective legislation against the drugs trade.
Harry Flood, Co. Carlow.
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