ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes that historically to go back to the period when the theoretical elucidation of the arts was first articulated, the period of the Renaissance. It was during the Renaissance that the literary arts, at least in humanist theory, were at the very centre of educational concern. For the Renaissance was a period when artefacts were produced in very large numbers, but also when important steps were taken in theorizing about the nature of these artefacts. The chapter first briefly explains about the literary arts which occupied this central position in humanist Renaissance education: what they were and why they were regarded as important. It then looks at how gradually others of the arts came to seem of almost equal importance — painting, sculpting and so on. In the medieval period, at school level people studied the trivium, which consisted of three disciplines — grammar, logic and rhetoric.
