A Young Man Being Introduced to the Seven Liberal Arts

In Florence in the late 1400s a banker's son was expected to know more than accounts. Botticelli painted this fresco for an upstairs room in a country villa outside the city owned by the Tornabuoni, bankers tied by marriage to the Medici, and it turns that education into a scene. A young man in a red cap is led by the hand toward a circle of women seated in a meadow, the seven Liberal Arts, the old school course from grammar and logic to astronomy and music. Who guides him is debated. The Louvre calls her Venus, with a question mark, and others see Grammar. Most specialists take the young man for Lorenzo Tornabuoni, married in 1486, though that too is argued. The bare patches of plaster near the bottom are losses from the wall, and a third scene from the same room was left behind and has not survived.