Prudential reasoning and practice is still considered a rhetorical skill, with modern rhetoricians working at recovering the Ciceronian tradition for a democratic, modern society. To the Roman orator and statesman, Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE), the three faces of prudence combine the arts of memoria (past), intelligentia (present), and providentia (future).

The Ciceronian formula of memoria-intelligentia-providentia became a scholastic commonplace, typically symbolized by a trinity of human heads (related to, yet different from, the trinity of animal heads, long associated with the ancient mysteries of Serapis, which were used to symbolize phronesis).

As the early modern period advanced, the Ciceronian Three Faces of Prudence would reduce to the more conventional, two-faced visages popularized by emblem literature. Typically, the two faces appear as mirror images, or a single face is shown paired with a mirror (here functioning as a cosmographical glass, symbolic of active imagination and self-knowledge).

Unlike phronesis, a paralogic ability which requires the sort of wisdom internalized only with age and great experience, prudentia is an art developed by way of strenuous practice. Although “rarely practised by the young,” as Edgar Wind notes, it “is not necessarily beyond their reach.”

15th century Florentine relief

The Three Faces of Prudence
(a symbol of triadic time, on
the human scale)