When I was honoured by the invitation to share in this tribute to a great and noble historian of culture I had no doubt in my mind as to the aspect of his rich and varied oeuvre I most wanted to examine and discuss. Like all of us who are interested in cultural history I have had frequent occasion to remember that inspired coinage of Huizinga’s who matched the idea of homo faber with that of homo ludens. Long ago I wrote a little essay entitled Meditations on a Hobby Horse or The Roots of Artistic Form which developed into a book entitled Art and Illusion largely concerned with that most elusive of mental states, that of fiction. Later, when I studied the idea of personification of such entities as Fama or Fortuna1 I remembered the pregnant pages Huizinga devoted to this strange twilight of ideas between mythology and abstraction in his study of Alanus de Insulis and again in Homo ludens. Now I am once more in the orbit of his problems in a study on which I am engaged that is to deal with decoration, ornament and the grotesque.
CITATION STYLE
Gombrich, E. H. (1973). Huizinga’s Homo ludens. In Johan Huizinga 1872–1972 (pp. 133–154). Springer Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-0730-1_8
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