16, 21, 24, HUT!

THE GREATEST ARTIST OF HIS TIME

 

AN APPRENTICE WITH A LARCENOUS HEART AND

AN AVERSION TO THE TRUTH

 

A YOUNG DUCHESS WHOSE PLAIN FACE
WHOSE PLAIN FACE BELIES HER BEAUTIFUL SOUL

 

Could the complex ways these three lives intertwine hold the key to a historical riddle as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa's smile -- why Leonardo da Vinci devoted three years to a painting of the second wife of an unimportant merchant when all the nobles of Europe were begging for a portrait by his hand?

 

It's the back cover blurb of the latest E. L. Konigsburg book I've read, her 1975 novel The Second Mrs. Gioconda (ISBN 1416906614), that I quote above, and it's a great story. It was hard for me to tell that it was a novel and not a history at first, with its detail of Renaissance Italy and the intersection of Leonardo da Vinci the artist, Salai his apprentice who's mentioned in his journals as a thief and liar, yes, but he becomes as close to Leonardo as he allowed anyone to be, and the Duchess Beatrice of Milan, who as mentioned above was pretty plain looking and largely ignored by her husband the Duke at first. But never by Leonardo. Or Salai.

 

In the first decade of the sixteenth century Milan was conquered by France and Leonardo with Salai has to move to Florence, where the historic -- well, for the purposes of painting the Mona Lisa, historic -- meeting of the subject with Leonardo is about to take place, with the Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo and his wife paying for a portrait of her. And something about her reminds Leonardo and Salai of Beatrice, who'd recently died at twenty-two. (Prior to the nineteenth century and something approaching modern medicine, you were lucky to live past fifty.) And there the story ends. You see the results of some intelligent and educated guesses. And great writing.

 

Time machine -- the awesomest thing in the world!

 

Repeat that lyric several times; it's what our son Jeffrey sung several times before going to school yesterday. I had to write that down! When the kids get ready on their own and don't severely mutilate each other getting out the door, it's a great thing. It's the fifth day of spring as I write this and it was lightly raining earlier and now just looks overcast. It isn't uncommon for the white stuff [S-N-O-W] to fall infrequently until the end of April though ... last night I came home to a dinner of pot roast with potatoes and carrots which Martha had had simmering in our crock pot since noon and we sat down and watched Once Upon A Time which elaborated on Ursula the Sea Witch's back story.

 

"If you're worried about losing your happy ending then you haven't lost it." Emma's words to her ... significant other Captain Hook -- who finally confesses he loves her in this episode, "Poor Unfortunate Soul"! -- seems logical enough. And the characters' quest to find the Author [who wrote the book "Once Upon A Time" that documents the happy endings of the heroic-leaning characters and the unhappy endings of those not so] may have culminated in a page ... but I'm giving it away. Though with Ursula getting back what she'd lost (and her happy ending?) one wonders if the book or the Author is quite so binding as people in the show's universe think.   


The one good thing about having a job that took you to hell and back was that you slept soundly. All your nightmares had already happened during the day.

Our final stop today takes us to the twenty-fourth century, specifically fifteen years after the end of the series Star Trek: The Next Generation. Within the latest novel Takedown (ISBN 9781476782713), Admiral William Riker -- he got promoted the previous year, and Worf is now the first officer of the USS Enterprise under Picard -- is representing the Federation at a peace conference called by an unknown party. Soon the representatives from each government, if Riker's any indication, commandeer the vessels they're aboard and without provocation attack deep space observation posts.

But first Riker explains to the senior staff of the USS Aventine (captained by Ezri Dax, from Deep Space Nine's final season) that they need to act to stop another power from completing and transmitting "Takedown", a spaceborne computer virus. Sounds reasonable and logical, but to do this without starting a war -- there's the rub. And disabling without destroying the observation posts afterward pits two of Starfleet's best and unconventional tactical minds (Picard and Riker) against each other! And the "unknown party" I referred to above turns out to be the last beings you would expect, beings I honestly thought we'd never see again.

But no age should lose its capacity to surprise us, David