I spent a few months illustrating one of largest works of medieval philosophy ever written.

Hello. Usually I post comics here (pointy dog, cats, many such things). But I have been very absent.

Well, I have a good reason for this. I released a book late last year, and then completely disappeared in my studio to illustrate this: a full map of 'The Summa Theologica' by Thomas Aquinas, one of the largest and most influential works of medieval theology ever.

I'm an artist, I do sell things of course, but mostly I like showing other people weird stuff I made, which I do not do often in real life. Imagine that I, a person who would do this, spends a lot of time inside by myself (wow). This definitely fits the bill for odd large work of art, I think.

The original work I illustrated here was written in the 1200s. A full copy of it fills multiple volumes. Could I fit it all into one 2 foot by 3 foot printed image? Let's find out.

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I was contacted by a group called Ave Maria press about a new book they were publishing. This was months before they released it. It’s out now - called 'The Summa Illuminated: A Guide to St. Thomas Aquinas' Masterpiece'.

If you're interested in the medieval world or medieval philosophy, or the history of thought, at all - I highly recommend this. Reading this book was great.

The concept we started with was: this book walks you entirely through the structure of the Summa Theologica. Perhaps we could visualize this structure, as a large cathedral the viewer would move through.

I basically got to use this author's scholarship full on to build my own map of this text: official scholar and priest, paired with local slightly strange artist. We’re really operating in the 1400s Tuscan city-state Renaissance milieu here, if I do say so myself.

Let's see how that turned out:

On this full image, you can see that it's broken up into a few sections, following the structure of the Summa Theologica. The bottom layer (orange) is the introduction, then the yellow is part one, the blue is part two, and the red in the center is part three. There's also a key in the middle:

A book reads front to back, it’s naturally linear - but visualizing the structure presented a small challenge. I needed the third section to be in the center, because it's really the overlap of the first and second sections (God, and then Man), so, ultimately I just built it as a real cathedral with an entrance, that you can see here with some first floor details:

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Each section has many subsections. One of the things I enjoy most is taking dense networks of information and making them visual. Really, “illustration” is just making information visual, in my opinion. Here’s a few examples of that:

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A lot of it is almost like medieval psychology: above you can see - you have these things called 'powers', powers are shaped by what habits. Habits actualize - make real - the potential of these powers. You have virtues, which shape a power in a good way, and vices, which shape a power in a bad way, and so on.

One of my favorite examples is this section here. On the print, this is just a few inches by a few inches. This is a pretty complicated web: there are two types of act (first and second) and they correspond to the two kinds of evil, because... well, you can see it all above.

This is probably one of the most rewarding things I've worked on, as I had to weave all this information into my brain and then put it back together visually. My son asked me what "prudence" was in the car and I just told him the definition straight from this book from the 1200s - very satisfying. That’s the image above.

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Moon (that was my wife's idea).

Obviously I could say a lot about this but, I'll just wrap this up.

If you read this far and are interested, it's for sale in my shop now. My URL for my site is my username, and there's a link to my shop there. I suppose this technically counts as marketing or something, but, as you can imagine from being the kind of guy that does this, I am somewhat of a hermit, so my real desire here was just to show people something I made that they might find cool.

I also really recommend the work this is based on. I know Imgur is not generally religion oriented, but a lot of you are nerds, and if you're interested in medieval times and that part of history in general, you can't really escape the influence of the Summa Theologica. It's almost 'the' major Catholic work, in my opinion, and that book walks you through the whole thing in like 200 pages. Any... priest character in... almost anything ever, for certain periods of time, even now honestly, would be familiar with this.

I don't think I can link here, but if you search up "The Summa Illuminated" and Ave Maria Press, it comes up.

Thanks for looking at my odd project. Hope your day is starting well.

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(real 1200s vibes. thanks).