The Seven Liberal Arts
In medieval Europe, a university education was divided into seven distinct areas, each represented by a particular planet and known as the seven liberal arts.
Dante Alighieri speculated that these arts, which grew into the sciences we know today, fitted the same structure as the planets. As the arts were seen as operating in ascending order, so were the planets and so, in decreasing order of planetary speed, grammar was assigned to the Moon, the quickest moving celestial body, dialectic was assigned to Mercury, rhetoric to Venus, music to the Sun, arithmetic to Mars, geometry to Jupiter and astrology/astronomy to the slowest moving body, Saturn.
Read more about this topic: Cultural Influence Of Astrology
Famous quotes containing the words liberal arts, liberal and/or arts:
“Sculpture and painting are very justly called liberal arts; a lively and strong imagination, together with a just observation, being absolutely necessary to excel in either; which, in my opinion, is by no means the case of music, though called a liberal art, and now in Italy placed even above the other two—a proof of the decline of that country.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“Be composed—be at ease with me—I am Walt Whitman, liberal and lusty
as Nature,
Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you,
Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves to rustle for you, do my words refuse to glisten and rustle for you.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“The present is an age of talkers, and not of doers; and the reason is, that the world is growing old. We are so far advanced in the Arts and Sciences, that we live in retrospect, and dote on past achievement.”
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)