Word: optimus
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Maxim us or Optimus? In pages as crowded but unhurried as a Bruegel canvas, Historian Durant shows the life and customs, major sins and minor pastimes of his period, stopping along the way to sketch in a thousand odd facts and arresting faces. The volume ranges over the whole of Europe (with major side trips to Persia, Russia and the New World), from 1300 to 1564 A.D. There is a bit of everything in the book-politics, war, art, architecture, philosophy, commerce, science-all by way of scene-setting for the great central struggle. Durant devotes a third...
Peter: If you are three times Maximus . . . you can't get in here unless you are Optimus also...
...down in the chronicle of the San Domenico convent at Fiesole are the simple facts about Fra Angelico: in 1407 "Fr. Joannes Petri de Mugello iuxta Vichium, optimus pictor, qui multas tabulas et parietes in diversis locis pinxit, accepit habitum clericorum in hoc conventu . . . et in sequenti anno fecit professionem."* To this, Vasari adds only that Fra Giovanni's name was Guido, that he was born in 1387, and entered the Dominican monastery "chiefly for the sake of his soul and for his peace of mind...