The New York Times at 9 PM ET June 23, 2011—
ROBERT FANO: I’m trying to think briefly how to put it.
GINO FANO: "On the Fundamental Postulates"—
"E la prova di questo si ha precisamente nel fatto che si è potuto costruire (o, dirò meglio immaginare) un ente per cui sono verificati tutti i postulati precedenti…."
"The proof of this is precisely the fact that you could build (or, to say it better, imagine) an entity by which are verified all previous assumptions…."
Also from the Times article quoted above…
"… like working on a cathedral. We laid our bricks and knew that others might later replace them with better bricks. We believed in the cause even if we didn’t completely understand the implications.”
— Tom Van Vleck
Some art that is related, if only by a shared metaphor, to Van Vleck's cathedral—
The art is also related to the mathematics of Gino Fano.
For an explanation of this relationship (implicit in the above note from 1984),
see "The Fano plane revisualized—or: the eIghtfold cube."