This series of cards illustrates the arts and sciences which constituted a liberal education in the 15th century. The basic curriculum was described allegorically by Martianus Capella in the 5th century. It was divided into the Trivium, the three verbal arts of grammar, logic, and rhetoric; and the Quadrivium, the four mathematical sciences of geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy.
In medieval universities, the Trivium was the undergraduate curriculum, and the Quadrivium the graduate curriculum. To these traditional seven here are added three advanced subjects: poetry, philosophy, and theology.
XXI Grammatica (grammar)
Grammar, the proper use of language (specifically Latin), was the foundation of education. The personification of grammar was often shown watering plants, as an allegory for nourishing young intellects. Here, a somewhat more stern teacher carries a file, for rasping away errors, and an amphora of medicine, to cure poor pronunciation.
XXII Loica (logic)
Where grammar taught students how to organize their words, logic taught them to organize their thoughts. Martianus described Logic as holding a snake, but as seen elsewhere in the Mantegna Tarot, the simple serpent has been upgraded to a wyvern—a two-legged, winged dragon. The serpent has long been a symbol of wisdom, and in this case also symbolizes the difficulty of grasping a slippery subject. The woman and the dragon regard each other in apparent surprise—perhaps logic has led them to an unexpected conclusion.
XXIII Rhetorica (rhetoric)
Rhetoric is where the student learns how to apply language and logic to make things happen. It is personified here by a woman holding a sword and wearing a helmet-like crown, indicating she is ready to do battle, while two cherubs trumpet to heaven and earth.
XXIIII Geometria (geometry)
Geometry introduces non-verbal reasoning to the curriculum. In this card she sits on a cloud, drawing shapes in the sky. The landscape below offers both a contrast between the orderly world of mathematics and the chaos of the world, and a reminder that the earliest applications of geometry were for surveying. Around the time these cards were created, painter Piero della Francesca published an illustrated edition of some of Archimedes’ geometrical treatises, as well as influential studies on perspective in painting.
XXV Aritmetricha (arithmetic)
Martianus described her with lightning, but our engraver gave her a nimbus. She is shown counting coins, a very low-level application of mathematics, but symbolic of the growing attention paid to accounting as banking and trade became prominent. The first known Italian book to cover algebra didn’t come along until 1494.
XXVI Musicha (music)
Classical scholars, as did Pythagoras, considered music to be an expression of mathematics and number theory; hence its inclusion in the Quadrivium. Music in the Quadrivium was more about harmonics and composition than performance; we leave that to the Muses. Personified, she sits on a swan, sacred to Apollo, playing a flute. An assortment of other instruments lay about her; some of which we see being played by Muses elsewhere in the deck.
XXVII Poesia (poetry)
Poetry was not one of the seven classical liberal arts, but is a synthesis of grammar, rhetoric, and music.
Here she sits on a bed of ivy, wearing a crown of laurel. Like Music, she plays a flute, but only with one hand; with the other she pours water from a pitcher into a small stream that begins from her pouring. At her feet is an orb of stars and landscape like the one in 20 Apollo. Behind her is the font from which she fills her pitcher, apparently sourced from a mountain spring. It could be the Castalian Spring at Delphi, which Roman poets regarded as a source of poetic inspiration.
Like the tarot Star card, Poesia pours forth two streams; but only one is water; the other is music.
XXVIII Philosophia (philosophy)
Philosophy, queen of the liberal arts, is depicted as ready to do battle to defend Truth. She carries a spear and a shield with a Gorgon’s head, both attributes of Pallas Athena, goddess of wisdom.
XXVIIII Astrologia (astrology)
The study of astronomy in the 15th century was concerned with calculating the positions of the Sun, Moon, and planets. Most of what was then known had been compiled in the second century by Claudius Ptolemy, who followed the geocentric conception of the universe laid down by Aristotle. Astronomy and astrology were closely linked in those pre-telescope times, and astronomers often supplemented their income or served their patrons by casting horoscopes. Because the motions of the heavens could be used to predict earthly phenomena such as tides and seasons, it seemed natural to assume they might have influence over human affairs as well.
XXX Theologia (theology)
As the Pope was the last of the states of man, theology occupies the final rung of the educational ladder, indicating the significance our Renaissance artist attached to religion. Theology is personified as a hermaphrodite, with a young female facing looking towards the heavens and an older, bearded male face looking downward.
