liberal arts

liberal arts. In the context of Renaissance art, a term applied to pursuits that were considered primarily as exercises of the mind rather than of practical skill and craftsmanship. The concept of a distinction between ‘liberal’ (worthy of a free man: Latin homo liber) and ‘vulgar’ arts goes back to classical antiquity, and survived in one form or another up to the Renaissance, forming the basis of secular learning in the Middle Ages. The name quadrivium was given to the subjects concerned with physical reality (arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music—that is the mathematical theory of music) and trivium to the arts of grammar, rhetoric, and logic. Collectively these were known as the seven liberal arts, and were subservient to philosophy, the supreme art. In these, as in all classifications that preceded the concept of the fine arts, the word ‘art’ carries a very different signification from that which it bears in normal language today—closer to the meaning that survives in academic terminology such as ‘arts degree’.

In the early Renaissance the lowly position accorded to the visual arts was increasingly contested, providing a theoretical basis for the social struggle that took place to raise them from the status of manual skill to the dignity of a liberal exercise of the spirit. The most formidable champion of the visual arts was Leonardo, who more than anyone else was responsible for creating the idea of the painter as a creative thinker. His revolutionary approach is illustrated in the following anecdote told by Vasari. When Leonardo was painting his Last Supper the prior of the monastery was puzzled by the way in which ‘he sometimes spent half a day at a time contemplating what he had done so far; if he had had his way, Leonardo would have toiled like one of the labourers hoeing in the garden and never put down his brush for a moment’. When the prior complained to the Duke of Milan, Leonardo explained ‘that men of genius sometimes accomplish most when they work the least, for they are thinking out inventions and forming in their minds the perfect ideas that they subsequently express and reproduce with their hands’. By about 1500 painting and sculpture were generally accepted as liberal arts by Italian humanists (significantly so in Baldassare Castiglione's influential Book of the Courtier of 1528, which was translated into English in 1561). However, as Anthony Blunt points out (Artistic Theory in Italy: 1450–1600, 1940), ‘As soon as the visual arts became generally accepted as liberal, the protagonists began to quarrel among themselves about which of them was the noblest and most liberal’ (see paragone). The acceptance came later in other parts of Europe than in Italy. Hilliard was one of the first English artists to make a claim for the nobility of his profession. In his treatise The Arte of Limning (written c.1600) he suggests that miniature painting is especially suited to gentlemen as it is such a private art; the miniaturist can work in secret and his portraits are intended for intimate enjoyment.

The original seven liberal arts (sometimes paired with the seven principal virtues—faith, hope, charity, etc.) are often represented in painting and sculpture, personified as women holding various attributes and being followed by famous masters of the arts concerned (e.g. Cicero with Rhetoric). The system was formulated by the 5th-century scholar Martianus Capella in his elaborate allegorical treatise The Marriage of Philologia and Mercury, which was much studied in the Middle Ages (more than 200 manuscripts of it survive). For the Baroque age the types of the liberal arts were codified by Cesare Ripa (see emblem) in his handbook of iconography.