January 5, 2010

you can tell me, i'm a doctor

I was leafing through the Journal of the American Medical Association discarded, unread, by the doctor down the hall. The cover, as is the tradition for the JAMA, is a reproduction of a famous artwork: Jan van Eyck’s The Virgin of Chancellor Rolin. I was at a loss to explain exactly what about the image bothers me—until I discovered a note inside detailing just how (and possibly why) the convergence is incorrect. Ha! The figures in the foreground are too big to fit through the doorway behind them!

Why don’t my trade journals have moments of Zen like this? Are doctors supposed to have better taste than engineers?

Erin (January 5, 2010)

Are doctors supposed to have better taste than engineers?

Yes.
The Good Doctor (January 7, 2010)

…not down the hall.

Actually, it is not so much that they are too large compared to the available entry but that the time of the making of that picture suffered from two deficits: 1) a naive state of the understanding and application of perspective, on the one hand, and 2) an enchantment with one’s own ability to achieve the replication of design of the tiles on the part of the artist that led to him being unable to do both that and to include the number of tiles required to fit the further-than-achieved distance between the figures and the entry. [However, I am intrigued with your insight about relative sizes, wihch leads me to consider the almost metaphysical figure of the matter of the superior “size” of the figures in question and the merely physical entry. THANK YOU! yet again for the marvelous curiosity that you are always able to provide.
MRhé (January 7, 2010)

I’m curious, Scott, as to how you manage to fit all this colorful commentary into such a drab greyscale website?
Freddie (January 8, 2010)

Ooo, burn! MRHE- can’t you see the purity and elegance that this simple format provides? Plus, I’m pretty sure people who still firmly believe in land lines are not about to add flash to their blogs… that would ruin the whole “newspaper” feel if you know what I mean!
THE GOOD DOCTOR (January 8, 2010)

Gee MRHE…some of still like, even prefer, TriChrome (my mind can no longer get around the real name that film carried when I was a callow youth travelling the world or taking pictures for my BF’s wedding…et cetera…but) it was Kodak and it worked–better than my sophomoric compositional skills–so that when my SLR went “click!” and the film was developed the pix actually looked better than my color slides of exotics and similar places. [We too still like the land line and are willing to pay for it…but walk away with one of those holsters on hip and/or in purse where, when set to “vibrate!” we can’t hear or feel it…one of the hazards of aging into numbness of the first kind.] Finally…aren’t we all simply glad that The SJ is a) making public commentary and [more importantly] b) ALLOWING commentary? Don’t we wish he’d next build a hot air balloon into a slight and super-light craft that he rows into the Charles and then, just as the fireworks reach their crescendo, alights into the air in? Like gradiated B&W, it’s in keeping with the soul we know.
KERaven, MD (January 11, 2010)

Scott, would you like a collection of fresh, never opened, never read JAMA’s? I could even throw in some Archives of Surgery, though their cover is always a radiographic image (can you name this) and not art work.