The Exaltation of the Arts

This tapestry belongs to a set of eight on The Arts and Sciences in the Colección Santander, which must in turn have been part of a larger group of which some are now missing. The different size of the individual tapestries is due to the fact that they were woven for specific locations, forming what was known in Brussels as a chambre en tapisserie.

The most important tapestry in the series, The Exaltation of the Arts depicts a large landscape that includes, from left to right, the figures of Sculpture in the form of a woman sculpting the figure of a child; Philosophy, mother of the arts, seated on the Earth, holding a compass and wearing a crown with three towers that symbolise ethics, physics and logic; and Painting, depicted as a bearded youth seated before an easel and painting “The Rape of Ganymede” in allusion to Apelles.

In the middle-ground an elderly man writing down some numbers symbolises Arithmetic; two mature men, probably elderly philosophers, represent Rhetoric; one of the them has his arm round the shoulders of a young boy holding Sculpture’s hammer and chisel; an elderly teacher symbolising Grammar gives instruction to a child engaged in writing; and on the far right, two veiled figures of noble appearance, one with a white beard, personify Dialectic. Music is represented by Apollo wearing a laurel wreath and resting his hand on the shoulder of Painting.

In 2001 J. González published a print by the Monogrammist T.G. after a design by Frans Floris. The designer of the preparatory cartoon for this tapestry used that print as his source, albeit with some variations. González identified the principal figure as Astrology and the boy with a hammer as Architecture, while the mature man looking at the boy writing would be Design.

All the tapestries in the set involve two themes: a moral one relating to the life of man, his virtues and vices, and an exaltation of the Arts, encompassing the Liberal Arts and the so-called Fine Arts.