ABSTRACT
The Florentine philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) was one of the first scholars who suggested that painting, which was generally regarded as a craft, should be included among the Liberal Arts. His main work, Platonic Theology (1482), compared his own time to a Golden Age that ‘has brought back to light the Liberal Arts which had almost been extinct: Grammar, Poetry, Rhetoric, Painting, Architecture, Music and the ancient art of singing to the Orphic Lyre’. 2 Ficino not only replaced logic with poetry in the trivium, but formulated an almost completely new quadrivium, removing geometry, arithmetic and astronomy, in favor of painting and architecture. 3
