The Learning Library

The seven arts personified, ordered, taught, and — in one etching — driven out of a city by Pluto and Bacchus. The tradition picturing its own curriculum.

Prudence with her mirror, Justice with her scales, Charity crowned above the rest: three works that give each virtue an emblem you can tell her by.

The four temperaments Hippocrates left behind, read from how four men behave at a game of cards — and carved as four children on their four elements.

Raphael's fresco in the Stanza della Segnatura, figure by figure: the four quadrivial groups in the foreground, the four stages of learning around Euclid, and the stairs that carry the eye up to Plato and Aristotle.