by Howard Chua-Eoan / © 2024 Bloomberg L.P. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Everyone seems to have a bucket list. In fact, too many of us seem to have the same bucket list: Climb Mount Everest; see the “Mona Lisa”; circumambulate Stonehenge; sashay after geisha in Kyoto; float through Venice; ogle the Crown Jewels. The lack of originality has led to the overcrowding of these fabled sites. It’s also put many of the objects and sites at risk: Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece at the Louvre has been assaulted several times. Stonehenge was spray-painted by climate activists. Kyoto’s elegantly kimonoed geisha have been harassed by amateur paparazzi.
It’s not that I think the aspirations we have in common are a bad catalog; but we’ve been pursuing them like to-do lists, ticking things off without reflecting about what we’ve done or seen. So this admittedly nerdy list is an antidote to some of that. I think they provide a unique perspective on our objective of living more fully.
Skip the “Mona Lisa”
There’s a less well-known but just as enigmatic earlier work by the same artist. See the other Leonardo masterpiece, “Lady with an Ermine,” which is in the much, much less crowded Czartoryski Museum in Krakow, Poland. The sitter is Cecilia Gallerani, one of the most cultured women of the late 15th century and the mistress of the Duke of Milan. Leonardo distills life in this painting with her gaze—just as he does with Mona Lisa’s smile.
The mysterious tortoises of the Mongol Khans
Mongolia has no native turtles. Yet standing within sight of the 16th-century Erdene Zuu Khilid, the country’s oldest surviving Buddhist monastery, are a couple of large carapaced monsters carved from stone, hailing from a couple of centuries before. The reptiles are all that remain of the site of Karakorum, the first capital of the Mongol empire, a city that evolved from the tent settlement Genghis Khan set up in the 13th century.
The Khan’s tortoises may not have the massive integrity of Stonehenge but they tell a wistful tale of how even the most fearsome empires can decline and fall and vanish.
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