Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 38, No. 341.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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        Date: 2025-01-25 10:45:37+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
        Subject: a scholar's story

The following is simply too good not to reproduce here, though it has
nothing directly to do with computing. But indirectly...

> One night in the late spring of 1936 the writer innocently thought
> to kill the short end of a hot evening by drafting an even shorter
> footnote to a book on renaissance book illustration. Before morning
> he had spent hours madly drawing lines with a ruler and was
> entangled in a subject that, occupying much of his subsequent
> leisure time, has flung him headlong and bewildered into fields and
> problems the very existence of which was then unknown to him and of
> which he now knows little more. On trains and boats that subject has
> provided him with the best of crossword puzzles, and in hours of
> lonesomeness and worry with the most efficient and cleansing of
> diversions.
>
> The following essays are but stumbling and tentative drafts of small
> parts of that proposed footnote. However, should they direct the
> attention of a few students of art to some of the problems they lead
> up to, their publication in their present state will have been
> justified.

 Prefatory note to William M. Ivins, Jr., On the Rationalization of
 Sight, with an Examination of Three Renaissance Texts on
 Perspective. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1938.


--
Willard McCarty,
Professor emeritus, King's College London;
Editor, Humanist
www.mccarty.org.uk


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