The 'Angelic Doctor' St. Thomas Aquinas as the source of inspiration

The mural centres around St Thomas Aquinas and is also called the 'apotheosis of St Thomas Aquinas'. Seated in the middle of the picture robed in black and white he holds an open book which says 'I desired Understanding and it was given me. I called upon the Spirit of Wisdom and it came to me . . .'1 Surrounded by many different knowledge systems, the symbolisms of colour also have various levels of meaning: revelatory, liturgical, classical and popular. Then below him in serried ranks is the imagery personifying the school subjects, and above him are the disciples, patriarchs and the hosts of heaven. Each figure was labelled and can easily be identified today. The meanings of the colours were to a large extent codified by church authorities, such as pope Innocent III 2, Durandus 3 and Dionysius the Aeropagite 4.

For St Thomas Aquinas, himself, beauty in colouring required colours to be clear and bright, 5 an opinion echoing Plato's supposed colour preference. 6 In fact, it was considered by one professor of historical aesthetics, A.E. Carret, that Aquinas thought of beauty as a shining through from another more perfect world 7 as in Plato's Theory of Ideas. Thus the purest and the brightest colours were reserved for the hosts of heaven and the dullest for the mere mortals at the base of the painting.

All colours, it was taught at that time, came from black and white, on the authority of Aristotle in his work on Meteorology 8 , and this leads back to the black and white of St Thomas from whom all of this great colour scheme derives.

The Pragmatic Scenario