Why a school bothers to curate its entire website. The word school comes from the Greek scholē (σχολή) — meaning leisure, in the classical sense of time freed for the contemplation of what is true, good, and beautiful. A schola is a place where that happens in community. We believe every human being — regardless of age, background, or occupation — is a lifelong learner and a natural appreciator of art and tradition. So we have curated not this one page but every page of this website the way we would curate a classroom: not to lecture you, but to discover alongside you.
How to read this website. You will notice four things on every page you visit:
I. Classical artwork, Scripture, and poetry are all clickable. Raphael and Michelangelo, Velho and Lorenzetti, the Pompeii mosaics and the Chartres rose windows — these are not decoration. They are the visual grammar of what we believe, and every image on every Virtualis page is paired with the text for a reason. The same treatment applies to the Scripture pull-quotes and the classical poems that appear throughout the site: click any Scripture verse to see the broader passage in context with the curator’s remarks, and click any poem excerpt to see the full poem with our notes on its author and its classical inheritance. The curator’s job is to make every artifact — painted, carved, sung, or written — speak.
II. We structure every page as a deliberate composition. This home page is arranged in eight movements — in the classical sense of a symphony, where each movement develops a theme and the whole forms one piece. Other pages carry different structures suited to their subject: the calendar is set as a Book of Hours, events as a 19th-century playbill, Our Christian Roots as a Byzantine illuminated Psalter, summer as a classical reading pile, student clubs as a heraldic broadsheet, Special Vocations as a Byzantine hagiographic plate. Every page has its own visual argument, and every page is designed to be read, not merely scrolled.
III. We write in the voice of the classical tradition, site-wide. Georgia serif, rubricated initials, Latin mottos, small-caps labels, scripture pull-quotes, occasional Greek and Hebrew — on every page, not only this one. It is the typographic inheritance of every schoolbook written between the printing of the Gutenberg Bible and the arrival of Microsoft Word, and it is how the classical tradition has always presented itself on the page. We want your child to grow up literate in it, and we think you are worth the effort of reading it, too. If it feels unfamiliar at first, stay with it: that is the whole point of a schola.
IV. We cite our sources, every time. Every classical claim on every page is attributable to a real author and a real work — Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Tertullian’s De Praescriptione Haereticorum, St. John Paul II’s Fides et Ratio, Aquinas’s De Veritate, Hugh of St. Victor’s Didascalicon, the Regula Benedicti, Dr. Amy Gilbert Richards on disability and classical education, the Church Fathers, the Scholastics, and the poets. We do not paraphrase a two-thousand-year tradition without naming its sources. If you want to fact-check us against a library, we welcome it.
Every choice you see on this website — the typography, the images, the structure, the citations — was deliberate. Read the pages with that in mind.
— The Curator, Virtualis