www Humanism for Sale

I found this site a couple of months ago – looks promising. It’s a good source of information about 500 year old Italian textbooks and has images of quite a lot of surviving pages. They’re mainly interesting to me from a design point of view but I found the below image mind-blowing…. It’s a page of doodling. Centuries-old doodling! Then again, if you look closely, it actually looks like the slacking pupil was playing around with a sort of magic square using the words ‘opera’, ‘rotas’ and ‘tenet’.  [I’ve just checked that and found the following: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sator_Square] So it seems our slacker was a sophisticated slacker…. Productive doodling…. Goody two-shoes.

http://www.humanismforsale.org/text/