The Garden of False Learning from The Table of Cebes. Culture: French. Designer: Based on a woodcut by David Kandel (German, ca. 1520-ca. 1596). Dimensions: H. 110 1/2 x W. 153 1/8 inches (280.7 x 388.9 cm). Date: 1550-80.This needlepoint hanging depicts a scene from the Tabula Cebetis (The Table of Cebes), a treatise long wrongly believed to have been written by Socrates' disciple Cebes that enjoyed great popularity as a Latin reader in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The text describes a painting displayed in the Temple of Saturn in Thebes that showed the journey through life and the pathway to true happiness. This hanging depicts the penultimate episode in the journey: the protagonist is beckoned from his path by a woman representing False Learning. Elegant figures in courtly dress are distracted from true wisdom and happiness by dedicating too much energy to the pursuit of knowledge through debate, philosophy, geometry, astrology and alchemy, geography, astronom