The Pope with his Cardinals, the Emperor with his Council, represent the two chief forces of Christendom, as conceived by the mediaeval jurists and the school of Dante.

Seated on thrones, they are ready to rise in defence of Holy Church, symbolised by a picture of S.
Maria del Fiore.

At their feet the black and white hounds of the Dominican order--_Domini canes_, according to the monkish pun--are hunting heretical wolves.

Opposite this painting is the apotheosis of S.Thomas Aquinas.
Beneath the footstool of this "dumb ox of Sicily," as he was called, grovel the heresiarchs--Arius, Sabellius, Averroes.

At again a lower level, as though supporting the saint on either hand, are ranged seven sacred and seven profane sciences, each with its chief representative.
Thus Rhetoric and Cicero, Civil Law and Justinian, Speculative Theology and the Areopagite, Practical Theology and Peter Lombard, Geometry and Euclid, Arithmetic and Abraham, are grouped together.