Acknowledgements

See the Credits page for image credits.

Reuben Thomas

My greatest single debt is to Reuben, computer consultant, singer, actor, friend, who has collaborated with me in many of my theatrical ventures from as far back as the 1990s. (His first appearance, while still a choral student, was in a public lecture devoted to Michelangelo and Josquin.) He designed and edited my companion site (Boyde’s Classic Dramas, 2024) and for the past three years he has devoted his expertise, energy and persistence to the design, development and implementation of this site in its present form. He selected and refined technologies and tools, including the simple static web-site generator Linton, to make the site durable without maintenance, while being comprehensible to future maintainers. He also proof-read the text and redrew some of the maps and diagrams. He, if anyone, is the single most important causa sine qua non.

Tom Parry-Jones

Ten years ago, Tom worked half time for six months to scan the multifarious 35mm slides (used in all the original public lectures) and to convert my original notes (scribbled or incoherently typed) into illustrated, more or less comprehensible, Word documents. It would have been too disheartening for me, and impossible for my collaborators, to revise the orginal materials in the form in which they had survived at the time of my retirement in 2002.

Michela Young

After Reuben and I had decided in principle that it would be worth revising my Art lectures to make their essence available in electronic form, we were almost stopped dead by the realisation that only about 5% of the original slides (embedded in Tom’s documents) were good enough to reproduce on line, that many details and supplementary slides would have to be added, and that permission would have to be sought to license most of the images. At this point we were providentially introduced to Michela (who had recently completed her PhD in Art History). She took on the mammoth task of sourcing new slides (now of amazing quality), obtaining permissions, and creating an Excel archive of the two thousand and more images used in all the lectures. Again, it must be said: ‘without her, not’.

Other acknowledgements

It is pleasant, too, to record my heartful thanks to faithful friends who have provided indispensable support for many years, and, in the last two years, have vetted, proof-read, and constructively criticised successive drafts of the present site. John Bruce-Jones, Mark Harrison, Michael Horton and Deborah Howard deserve special mention, but there were dozens more.

At a totally different level, I would also like to acknowledge my debt to the principal art historians who inspired me and taught me how to look at paintings back in the 1970s and 1980s. (Poetry and music have always come to me like leaves on a tree, but I can’t draw for toffee. My serious involvement in the visual arts was delayed until I was nearly 40; and I needed a lot of guidance.) For their writings: Ernst Gombrich, Paul Joannides, Alastair Smart, John Summerson and John White. For their university lecture courses: Deborah Howard, Paul Joannides (again), Duncan Robinson and Frank Salmon.