Presented on October 8, 2021, our logo was chosen to depict the motivation and the purpose for creating our Centre, the search for knowledge for knowledge’s sake, and the passion for learning that drives every researcher.

Prof. Danilo Facca, the Senior Scholar in our project, describes our logo thoroughly in the following words.

The logo of the Centre for the History of Renaissance Knowledge is a graphic transcription of a fragment of Raphael’s famous fresco ‘The School of Athens‘, which probably depicts Euclid drawing a geometric figure. This is an iconographic motif well known to medieval art, where the hand is usually that of God in the act of creating the world “in mensura, numero et pondere” (Wis. 11, 21), but also taken up by William Blake (reminiscent of Milton, PL, VII, 225-7). Also worth mentioning is one of the last tercets of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy:

‘As the geometer intently seeks
to square the circle, but he cannot reach,
through thought on thought, the principle he needs…’

Creating, measuring, drawing, finding a solution to a problem – however one reads this image, it represents three ontological spheres involved in the cognitive act: personal (the hand), technological (the compass, the blackboard), ideal (the geometric figures depicted).