Liberal Arts

LIBERAL ARTS. - Under the name of l. a. go the literary and scientific disciplines which constituted, during the Middle Ages, the propaedeutic teaching to philosophy and theology. They were divided into two groups, called the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music). The name, through the Latin tradition, derives from the Greek (ἐλεύθεροι τέχναι), and designates the arts worthy of a free man as opposed to the mercenary and mechanical ones (βάνσωσι). The distinction, which appears for the first time in Plato (De republica, 405 a; 522a), is repeated by Aristotle, who, treating in the Politics (VIII, 2) of the education of the young, defines as mechanical every art or discipline that renders a free man unfit for the exercise of virtue. Cicero uses respectively for the two classes the terms "liberales" or "ingenuae" or "honestae," and "sordidae" or "inhonestae" (De officiis, I, 42).

As regards their number, Aristotle (loc. cit.) indicates as constitutive of the teaching commonly in use in his time: grammar, gymnastics and music, "to which sometimes is added painting." Cicero in the De oratore (III, 32) includes in them: geometry, music, physics, ethics, politics and the study of letters and of the poets. Quite close to the medieval list is that given by Quintilian (Institutiones oratoriae, I, 10), who uses, to designate the whole, the Greek expression ἐγκύκλιος παιδεία ("orbis doctrinae"), an expression that brings us back to the ideal and the practice of the Hellenistic age. The entire complex appears definitively fixed in Pseudo-Cebes and in the Neoplatonist Porphyry. After Boethius the cycle of the seven arts, which until then had, according to the ideals of culture, undergone various oscillations, is by now in universal use.

Grammar from the last times of the republic, and then during the empire, had as its principal task the teaching of the parts of speech, based on the testimony and authority of the ancients. Varro distinguishes four phases in the study of grammar: "lectio" or reading of the classical text; "emendatio" or literal and literary commentary; "enarratio" or criticism of the text and of the style; "iudicium" or overall view. During the Middle Ages grammar embraces the study of the ancient and recent grammarians and writers. Very widely circulated and often commented upon are the two works on the 8 parts of speech (Ars minor and Ars maior) of Aelius Donatus, who had been, at Rome, the teacher of St. Jerome and the most celebrated grammarian of his time. Alongside him, very well known is Priscian of Caesarea in Mauretania (ca. 500), principally for the work, in 18 books, Institutio de arte grammatica. Moreover, together with writers such as Orosius, Gregory of Tours, Boethius, grammar includes the reading of the Latin classics, Virgil, Horace, Seneca, etc.

Rhetoric had been much honored among the Romans. The traditional model of this discipline, intended to form the "vir eloquentissimus," were the Greek orations. The teaching comprised a theoretical part concerning the kinds of eloquence: epideictic, judicial, deliberative, and its essential moments: invention, arrangement, elocution; and a practical part consisting in frequent and varied exercises. In the Middle Ages rhetoric does not have primary importance. Theodoric of Chartres in his Heptateuchon recalls as models to be preferred: Cicero, Quintilian, Marius Victorinus.

Of the remaining liberal arts, geometry seems to have been taught during the empire (Ulpian, Digest 50, 13, 1)

and especially astronomy seem to have been taught during the empire. Of dialectic, arithmetic and music Varro makes mention, and he moreover adds to them medicine and architecture. In the Middle Ages dialectic had great development, which assumed in the 11th-12th centuries very great importance. While for St. Augustine it is still the science of the laws regulating the activity of reason or the art of convincing and confounding the adversary, in the Middle Ages, after the discovery of the entire Aristotelian Organon, it gradually becomes enriched and transformed, until it assumes the characteristics of authentic philosophical speculation. The disciplines of the Quadrivium had lesser extension in the Middle Ages, since they required by their very nature a more specialized technical preparation. The basis of the teaching of mathematics and astronomy were first of all the books of Boethius, the Astrolabe of Gerbert and the theories of Euclid, in the version of Adelard of Bath.

The medievals found the entire ordering of the l. a. already clearly delineated in the De artibus ac disciplinis liberalium litterarum (part 1, praef.) and in the De institutione divinarum litterarum of Cassiodorus. It was these two works, a kind of general encyclopedia of knowledge, that contributed to disseminating that program of teaching which, taken up and renewed later by Isidore of Seville and still later by Alcuin, became, in the Trivium and Quadrivium, the characteristic canon of studies during the Middle Ages. Such teaching, modest though it was, fulfilled, particularly during the centuries of the early Middle Ages, a function of undoubted importance, preserving for the speculative rebirth of the 12th-13th centuries the substantial continuity of classical thought and culture.

It was precisely during this time that the extension of knowledge, after the discovery of the Aristotelian synthesis, led to the gradual devaluation of the Trivium and Quadrivium. But even Dante, according to a probable interpretation of the allegory, judges the l. a. an indispensable propaedeutic to human knowledge when he speaks of the noble castle of Limbo where, with the other sages, he must enter through seven gates (Inf., IV, 106-11). In full humanism, P. Paolo Vergerio entitles the pedagogical work written for Ubertino, son of the lord of Carrara, De ingenuis ac liberalibus studiis. But by now the liberal studies are richer, and the aim is no longer the formation of the rhetorician or the philosopher, but that of the condottiere and the prince.

ICONOGRAPHY

The designation of the liberal arts is sometimes extended from the liberal arts enumerated in the Trivium and the Quadrivium to medicine and architecture. Personified by Martianus Capella and his followers as female figures with specific attributes and, as far as the literary sources show, already depicted in the Carolingian era, the liberal arts appear, in accordance with the encyclopedic spirit of the Middle Ages, on the portals of French Gothic cathedrals (Chartres, Sens, Auxerre), on the pulpit of Nicola Pisano in Siena and that of Giovanni Pisano in Pisa, on the fountain of Perugia and finally in the atrium of the cathedral of Freiburg (ca. 1300). The apogee of the encyclopedic concept is demonstrated in the reliefs of Giotto's campanile, where the liberal arts are coordinated with the seven virtues, the seven sacraments, the seven planets, the mechanical arts and the representatives of the corresponding disciplines. Another composition of the encyclopedic type is the nearly contemporary one of the Cappellone degli Spagnoli in S. Maria Novella, where the individual famous practitioners of the arts are associated with them. From the tomb of Robert of Anjou in S. Chiara in Naples onward, the liberal arts are placed beside a deceased person to magnify his qualities, a motif that recurs in the fifteenth century in the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini and in the tomb of Sixtus IV by Pollaiolo. With some adherence to the medieval concept, the liberal arts are found around St. Thomas disputing with the heretics in Filippino Lippi's fresco in S. Maria sopra Minerva in Rome. They take on a purely decorative value, however, even if in relation to their setting, in an inlaid door of the ducal palace of Urbino or in the Borgia Apartment in the Vatican (Pinturicchio and other painters) or in the panels attributed to Justus of Ghent. Subsequently the naturalistic conception that informs painting banishes allegories; for this reason Raphael in the School of Athens interrupted the old allegorical scheme, replacing the symbols of the liberal arts with the figures of their greatest practitioners alone. - See Plates VIII-IX.

Kurt Rathe