Quattuor Virtutes Cardinales

In 2017 I resolved to participate in the Confederation Centre Art Gallery’s "Artist Trading Cards" event.

Some time after I applied, I received an update:

The count is in. We all have 40 cards to make for the August 3 exchange.

The idea being that 40 people would make 40 cards, and then leave the evening with 39 new ones from other artists.

But what to print?

A week before the deadline, the word “whimsy” came into my head.

What about if I created a new “seven deadly sins”–whimsy, pith, ambition, and so on.

I Googled “seven deadly sins” when I got to the office to see what I was dealing with, historically. And in doing so I learned that in addition to seven deadly sins there are also seven virtues, and, of those, four are cardinal virtues: temperance, fortitude, prudence and justice. Ever-mindful of feature-creep, I reasoned that printing four virtues would be a reasonable task to take on in the time available.

I decided to print 10 copies of each cardinal virtue, ending me up with a variety pack of 40 to go into the card pool.

And I decided to print the cards in Latin, what given that Saint Thomas Aquinas was their most recent canonizer.

And so was born the Quattuor Virtutes Cardinales set.

Prudentia, Temperantia, Iustitia and Fortitudo.

These sets of four cards are those that went undistributed after the event.

Each card is 2½" x 3½" (6 cm x 9 cm) white business card stock, printed with black ink from metal type and ornaments. On the back is a credit Quattuor Virtutes Cardinales, ruk.ca, 2017.