Murderous Renaissance Painters: The Things You Learn From Programming Books
Murderous Renaissance Painters: The Things You Learn From Programming Books
One thing I’ve always found entertaining in technical works is how authors bring in their random non-technical hobbies and interests as examples. I’ve learned a lot of trivia over the years because an author happened to also be into exotic cooking or had traveled in South America.
Here’s a prime example Jim Blandy’s book Programming Rust. I had no idea that these three famous Renaissance artists had each committed murder. (I’ve slightly Photoshopped the text to make it more compact).
In case you’re wondering:
- Gesualdo killed his wife when he found her inflagrante delecto with the Duke of Andria.
- Caravaggio was a brawler with a temper problem, and in one of his many fights, he killed a man.
- Cellini killed his brother’s murderer in a case of revenge. He had a pretty wild life. While later imprisoned, someone tried to kill him by sneaking diamond dust into his food, though the attack failed because a lesser gemstone was used.
The things you learn!
raindog308 is a longtime community LETizen, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.
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