Sandro Botticelli's fresco "A Young Man Being Introduced to the Liberal Arts" presents an idealized educational program set in a classroom crowded with teachers. Created between 1480-1487, this remarkable work emphasizes specific disciplines such as dialectics and geometry, with the ultimate objective of making every future citizen capable of self-governance.
The scene unfolds like a journey through a dark forest at night, where a small red hat advances through rugged terrain with entire sections of the landscape appearing detached. All characters remain safe and sound, beginning with the young man in a turquoise mantle who stands out among this entirely feminine assembly. The gentleman is led by a woman dressed in red and white who holds his hand, presenting him like an angelic godmother to her colleagues seated in a semicircle.
A true Pantone color palette spreads across the robes, pelisses, headdresses, and hoods. Citrine and ochre yellows respond to aventurine and celadon greens, while Saturn whites reflect amaranth and madder red. Violet ensures certain transitions in this carefully composed arrangement. Within the semicircle, seven women are seated, with one dominating like a mother superior throning at the center. Rather than a Solomonic queen rendering justice from her chair, she appears more like a director of an open-air university.
The central figure's headdress is technically sophisticated, with a thick braid wrapped around her head to maintain her veil. The fur on her sleeves and collar also commands respect, while her amaranth cloak responds to the godmother's madder cape. As she guides her apprentice, the godmother tilts her head toward the mother superior in what appears to be a request for cooptation. The enthroned figure greets them with her right hand, somewhere between blessing and salutation.
Surprisingly, the young man seems suspicious, his half-open eyelids perhaps noticing the bow that the great leader holds in her hand. From her heights, she can sanction whomever she wishes. The young man's gaze isn't clear - his eyes could just as well be directed toward the first woman in the circle, who holds a parchment and is dressed in aventurine from head to toe. She too observes him in gentle reverie. Her neighbor, holding the famous scorpion, seems less innocent and rather secretive, with a fleeting gaze beneath her veil.
This fresco, measuring 238 x 284 cm and housed in the Louvre's collection, forms part of a set of three decorations that adorned the walls of a room in Villa Lemmi, a property belonging to the Tornabuoni clan located in a village near Florence. This piece of painting now sits in the Louvre alongside "Venus and the Three Graces Offering Gifts to a Young Girl." These two frescoes should be read together to connect the young man and young girl: Lorenzo Tornabuoni and Giovanna degli Albizzi, married in 1486.
Lorenzo was the son of Giovanni, himself uncle to Lorenzo de' Medici. His father served as Florence's ambassador to the papal court and director of the Medici branch in Rome. For his son's marriage, he commissioned these frescoes from Botticelli, which were supposed to feature the Tornabuoni and/or Albizzi coats of arms. The fragmented putti likely held each family's blazon, later erased by subsequent owners.
The Tornabuoni family and Botticelli moved in the same humanist circles, notably Marsilio Ficino's academy, which promoted free education mixing Christian and Platonic doctrines. The curriculum included mastery of the liberal arts - "arts" in the ancient sense of know-how including theory and practice, "liberal" referring to the Latin "liber," meaning "self-governing." This was a disinterested culture, embodied by feminine allegories that would nourish the student without utilitarian purpose.
These disciplines were to be followed in a precise order: first the trivium subjects (grammar, rhetoric, dialectics), then the quadrivium subjects (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music). Seven stages to complete, beginning with Grammar - without it, no mastery of language. Before the Renaissance, liberal arts served as a prerequisite to theology based on understanding and interpreting Holy Scripture. In Botticelli's time, the liberal arts became an instrument of individual perfectionism, taught in academies and found on tarot cards as educational games, sometimes on villa walls as fresco-educational support.
The other figures are clearer, their instruments less equivocal. Rhetoric unfolds her parchment featuring chosen arguments, frameworks for clear, logical discourse. The woman with the scorpion is Dialectics, a perfidious sophist who picks convincing words without necessarily seeking truth. To her left, Arithmetic holds a perforated sheet, ancestor of the calculator. On the other side of the dean, the sciences turn their backs: Geometry with her square stands open-mouthed while Astronomy in front of her globe listens to Music activating her organ.
Such a seating arrangement could signify a custom program for the Tornabuoni family. Seated to the chief's right, Arithmetic occupies a place of honor - from the first year, a banker must know how to count. As for the perfidious scorpion, each will see what they will, but to negotiate rates with the Vatican, it's better to conceal certain information and not say amen to every proposition.
With such education, Lorenzo must have made the Tornabuoni & Co. business flourish. Some might relativize the disinterested aspect of liberal arts, while others would respond that the student is free to choose the profession that suits him upon leaving his forest. However, initiation alone aims for no finality - without expectation or calculation. The student activates his thinking alongside dreamy figures, these untouchable signatures of Botticelli.
This dark wood represents what Montaigne called our "back-shop," the silence necessary to build our beings. Whether woman, man, young, or less young, everyone can don Lorenzo's cape to strengthen their ideas, master numbers, understand great masses, and sharpen their arguments. The objective remains the same: to govern oneself and not be anyone's plaything. Today, however, our hyperconnection and hysterical consumption condemn the entrance to our forests - a pity, because some alternative truths grow outside.
