The fresco depicts a congregation of ancient philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists, with Plato and Aristotle featured in the center. The identities of most figures are ambiguous or discernable only through subtle details or allusions;[1] among those commonly identified are Socrates, Pythagoras, Archimedes, Heraclitus, Averroes, and Zarathustra. Additionally, Italian artists Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo are believed to be portrayed through Plato and Heraclitus, respectively.[2][3] Raphael included a self-portrait beside Ptolemy. Raphael is the only character who is looking directly at the viewer in the artwork.
The School of Athens is regarded as one of Raphael's best-known works and has been described as his "masterpiece and the perfect embodiment of the classical spirit of the Renaissance".[5]
Program, subject, figure identifications and interpretations
The Stanza della Segnatura
The Stanza della Segnatura was the first of the rooms to be decorated, and The School of Athens, representing philosophy, is believed to be the third painting to be finished there, after La Disputa (Theology) on the opposite wall, and the Parnassus (Literature).[6]
The School of Athens is one of a group of four main frescoes on the walls of the Stanza (those on either side centrally interrupted by windows) that depict distinct branches of knowledge. Each theme is identified above by a separate tondo containing a majestic female figure seated in the clouds, with putti bearing the phrases: "Seek Knowledge of Causes", "Divine Inspiration", "Knowledge of Things Divine" (Disputa), "To Each What Is Due". Accordingly, the figures on the walls below exemplify philosophy, poetry (including music), theology, and justice.[7][8] The traditional title is not Raphael's. The subject of the painting is actually philosophy, or at least ancient Greek philosophy, and its overhead tondo-label, "Causarum Cognitio", tells us what kind, as it appears to echo Aristotle's emphasis on wisdom as knowing why, hence knowing the causes, in Metaphysics Book I and Physics Book II. Indeed, Plato and Aristotle appear to be the central figures in the scene. However, many of the philosophers depicted sought knowledge of first causes. Many lived before Plato and Aristotle, and hardly a third were Athenians. The architecture contains Roman elements, but the general semi-circular setting having Plato and Aristotle at its centre might be alluding to Pythagoras' monad.
Commentators have suggested that nearly every great ancient Greek philosopher can be found in the painting, but determining which are depicted is speculative, since Raphael made no designations outside possible likenesses, and no contemporary documents explain the painting. Compounding the problem, Raphael had to invent a system of iconography to allude to various figures for whom there were no traditional visual types. For example, while the Socrates figure is immediately recognizable from Classical busts, one of the figures alleged to be Epicurus is far removed from his standard depiction.
Aspects of the fresco other than the identities of the figures have also been variously interpreted, but few such interpretations are unanimously accepted among scholars. That the rhetorical gestures of Plato and Aristotle are kinds of pointing (to the heavens, and down to earth) is popularly accepted as likely. However, Plato's Timaeus – which is the book Raphael places in his hand – was a sophisticated treatment of space, time, and change, including the Earth, which guided mathematical sciences for over a millennium. Aristotle, with his four-elements theory, held that all change on Earth was owing to motions of the heavens. In the painting Aristotle carries his Ethics, which he denied could be reduced to a mathematical science. It is not certain how much the young Raphael knew of ancient philosophy, what guidance he might have had from people such as Bramante and whether a detailed program was dictated by his sponsor, Pope Julius II.
Nevertheless, the fresco has often been interpreted as an exhortation to philosophy and as a visual representation of the role of Love in elevating people toward higher knowledge, in consonance with contemporary theories of Marsilio Ficino and other neo-Platonic thinkers linked to Raphael.[9]
However, to Heinrich Wölfflin, "it is quite wrong to attempt interpretations of the School of Athens as an esoteric treatise ... The all-important thing was the artistic motive which expressed a physical or spiritual state, and the name of the person was a matter of indifference" in Raphael's time.[11] Raphael's artistry then orchestrates a beautiful space, continuous with that of viewers in the Stanza, in which a great variety of human figures, each one expressing "mental states by physical actions", interact, in a "polyphony" unlike anything in earlier art, in the ongoing dialogue of Philosophy.[12]
An interpretation of the fresco relating to hidden symmetries of the figures and the star constructed by Bramante was given by Guerino Mazzola and collaborators.[13] The main basis are two mirrored triangles on the drawing from Bramante (Euclid), which correspond to the feet positions of certain figures.[14]
Paolo Zamboni, professor of vascular surgery at the University of Ferrara, made a medical study of the painting, noting that Raphael's depiction of Michelangelo (as Heraclitus) shows varicose veins in the legs.[15]
Figures
The identities of some of the philosophers in the picture, such as Plato and Aristotle, have been ascertained. Several other of Raphael's figures have been the subject of conjecture. Some have received multiple identifications, both as depictions of ancients and as portraits of Raphael's contemporaries. Vasari mentions a portrait of the young Duke of Mantua, leaning over Bramante with his hands raised near the bottom right, and a self-portrait of Raphael himself.[16]
In the center of the fresco, at its architecture's central vanishing point, are the two undisputed main subjects: Plato on the left and his student Aristotle on the right. Both figures hold contemporary (of the time), bound copies of their books in their left hands, while gesturing with their right. Plato holds Timaeus and Aristotle holds his Nicomachean Ethics. Plato is depicted as old, grey, and barefoot. By contrast, Aristotle, slightly ahead of him, is in mature manhood, wearing sandals and gold-trimmed robes, and the youths about them seem to look his way. In addition, these two central figures gesture along different dimensions: Plato vertically, upward along the picture-plane, into the vault above; Aristotle on the horizontal plane at right-angles to the picture-plane (hence in strong foreshortening), initiating a flow of space toward viewers.
It is popularly thought that their gestures indicate central aspects of their philosophies: for Plato, his Theory of Forms, and for Aristotle, an emphasis on concrete particulars. Many interpret the painting to show a divergence of the two philosophical schools. Plato argues a sense of timelessness whilst Aristotle looks into the physicality of life and the visible world.
There are two sculptures in the background. The one on the left is the god Apollo, god of light, archery and music, holding a lyre.[5] The sculpture on the right is Athena, goddess of wisdom, in her Roman guise as Minerva.[5]
The main arch, above the characters, shows a meander (also known as a Greek fret or Greek key design), a design using continuous lines that repeat in a "series of rectangular bends" which originated on pottery of the Greek Geometric period and then became widely used in ancient Greek architectural friezes.[17]
Drawings and cartoon
A number of drawings made by Raphael as studies for the School of Athens are extant.[18] A study for the Diogenes is in the Städel in Frankfurt[19] while a study for the group around Pythagoras, in the lower left of the painting, is preserved in the Albertina Museum in Vienna.[20] Several drawings, showing the two men talking while walking up the steps on the right and the Medusa on Athena's shield,[21][lower-alpha 1] the statue of Athena (Minerva) and three other statues,[23] a study for the combat scene in the relief below Apollo[24] and "Euclid" teaching his pupils[25] are in the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology at the University of Oxford.
The cartoon for the painting is in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan.[26] Missing from it is the architectural background, the figures of Heraclitus, Raphael, and Protogenes. The group of the philosophers in the left foreground strongly recall figures from Leonardo's Adoration of the Magi.[27] Additionally, there are some engravings of the scene's sculptures by Marcantonio Raimondi; they may have been based on lost drawings by Raphael, as they do not match the fresco exactly.[28]
Modern reproductions of the fresco abound. For example, a full-size one can be seen in the auditorium of Old Cabell Hall at the University of Virginia. Produced in 1902 by George W. Breck to replace an older reproduction that was destroyed in a fire in 1895, it is four inches off scale from the original, because the Vatican would not allow identical reproductions of its art works.[30]
A 1689 tapestry reproduction by the Gobelins Manufactory and commissioned by Louis XIV hangs above the presiding officer's platform in the French National Assembly chamber.[31] It had been removed in 2017 for a three-year restoration process undertaken by the Mobilier National, which manages Gobelins Manufactory.
Similar subjects are known from antiquity, notably the Plato's Academy mosaic. It perhaps also appeared in two groups of statues from Roman Egypt. The 19th century French consul Jean-François Mimaut mentioned nine statues at the Serapeum of Alexandria holding rolls, while eleven statues were found at the Memphis Saqqara. A review of "Les Statues Ptolémaïques du Sarapieion de Memphis" ascribed them to the 3rd century, sculpted of limestone and stucco, some standing and others sitting. Rowe and Rees 1956 suggested that both statue groups share a similar subject to the Plato's Academy mosaic, with the Saqqara figures identified as: "(1) Pindare, (2) Démétrios de Phalère, (3) x (?), (4) Orphée (?) aux oiseaux,[33] (5) Hésiode, (6) Homère, (7) x (?), (8) Protagoras, (9) Thalès, (10) Héraclite, (11) Platon, (12) Aristote (?)."[34][35] However, there have been other suggestions (e.g. Mattusch 2008). Plato and Thales are commonly identified as central figures.[36]
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, known mononymously as Michelangelo, was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and poet of the High Renaissance. Born in the Republic of Florence, his work was inspired by models from classical antiquity and had a lasting influence on Western art. Michelangelo's creative abilities and mastery in a range of artistic arenas define him as an archetypal Renaissance man, along with his rival and elder contemporary, Leonardo da Vinci. Given the sheer volume of surviving correspondence, sketches, and reminiscences, Michelangelo is one of the best-documented artists of the 16th century. He was lauded by contemporary biographers as the most accomplished artist of his era.
Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, now generally known in English as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form, ease of composition, and visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur. Together with Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, he forms the traditional trinity of great masters of that period.
Luca Signorelli was an Italian Renaissance painter from Cortona, in Tuscany, who was noted in particular for his ability as a draftsman and his use of foreshortening. His massive frescos of the Last Judgment (1499–1503) in Orvieto Cathedral are considered his masterpiece.
In art history, the High Renaissance was a short period of the most exceptional artistic production in the Italian states, particularly Rome, capital of the Papal States, and in Florence, during the Italian Renaissance. Most art historians state that the High Renaissance started between 1490 and 1500, and ended in 1520 with the death of Raphael, although some say the High Renaissance ended about 1525, or in 1527 with the Sack of Rome by the mutinous army of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, or about 1530. The best-known exponents of painting, sculpture and architecture of the High Renaissance include Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Bramante. In the 21st century, the use of the term has been frequently criticized by some academic art historians for oversimplifying artistic developments, ignoring historical context, and focusing only on a few iconic works.
Il Sodoma was the name given to the Italian Renaissance painter Giovanni Antonio Bazzi. Il Sodoma painted in a manner that superimposed the High Renaissance style of early 16th-century Rome onto the traditions of the provincial Sienese school; he spent the bulk of his professional life in Siena, with two periods in Rome.
The Sistine Chapel ceiling, painted in fresco by Michelangelo between 1508 and 1512, is a cornerstone work of High Renaissance art.
The four Raphael Rooms form a suite of reception rooms in the Apostolic Palace, now part of the Vatican Museums, in Vatican City. They are famous for their frescoes, painted by Raphael and his workshop. Together with Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes, they are the grand fresco sequences that mark the High Renaissance in Rome.
The Triumph of Galatea is a fresco completed around 1512 by the Italian painter Raphael for the Villa Farnesina in Rome.
The Garvagh Madonna is an oil painting by the Italian Renaissance artist Raphael, dating to c. 1509–1510. It depicts the Virgin, the Christ Child and the infant John the Baptist, and is one of many paintings by Raphael with this trio. It is from early in the artist's third, or Roman period, in which distinctive changes are seen from his Umbrian or Florentine period in style and use of colour, with the introduction of more natural subjects and settings.
The Madonna della Seggiola or The Madonna della Sedia is an oil on panel Madonna painting by the High Italian Renaissance artist Raphael, executed c. 1513–1514, and housed at the Palazzo Pitti Collection in Florence, Italy. Although there is documentation on its arrival to its current location, Palazzo Pitti, it is still unknown who commissioned the painting; however, it has been in the Medici family since the 16th century.
The Disputation of the Sacrament, or Disputa, is a painting by the Italian Renaissance artist Raphael. It was painted between 1509 and 1510 as the first part of Raphael's commission to decorate with frescoes the rooms that are now known as the Stanze di Raffaello, in the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican. At the time, this room was known as the Stanza della Segnatura, and was the private papal library where the supreme papal tribunal met.
The Parnassus is a fresco painting by the Italian High Renaissance artist Raphael in the Raphael Rooms, in the Palace of the Vatican in Rome, painted at the commission of Pope Julius II.
The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple is a fresco of the Italian renaissance painter Raphael. It was painted between 1511 and 1512 as part of Raphael's commission to decorate with frescoes the rooms that are now known as the Stanze di Raffaello, in the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican. It is located in the room that takes its name from it, the Stanza di Eliodoro.
Pope Julius II, commissioned a series of highly influential art and architecture projects in the Vatican. The painting of the Sistine Chapel ceiling by Michelangelo and of various rooms by Raphael in the Apostolic Palace are considered among the masterworks that mark the High Renaissance in Rome. His decision to rebuild St Peter's led to the construction of the present basilica.
Florentine painting or the Florentine school refers to artists in, from, or influenced by the naturalistic style developed in Florence in the 14th century, largely through the efforts of Giotto di Bondone, and in the 15th century the leading school of Western painting. Some of the best known painters of the earlier Florentine School are Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Filippo Lippi, the Ghirlandaio family, Masolino, and Masaccio.
Italian Renaissance painting is the painting of the period beginning in the late 13th century and flourishing from the early 15th to late 16th centuries, occurring in the Italian Peninsula, which was at that time divided into many political states, some independent but others controlled by external powers. The painters of Renaissance Italy, although often attached to particular courts and with loyalties to particular towns, nonetheless wandered the length and breadth of Italy, often occupying a diplomatic status and disseminating artistic and philosophical ideas.
Timoteo Viti, sometimes called Timoteo della Viti or Timoteo da Urbino, was an Italian Renaissance painter, who was closely associated with Raphael, who was fourteen years his junior.
The Cardinal and Theological Virtues is a lunette fresco by Raphael found on the south wall of the Stanza della Segnatura in the Apostolic Palace of the Vatican. Three of the cardinal virtues are personified as statuesque women seated in a bucolic landscape, and the theological virtues are depicted by putti.
The portrait of a man in red chalk in the Royal Library of Turin is widely, though not universally, accepted as a self-portrait of Leonardo da Vinci. It is thought that Leonardo da Vinci drew this self-portrait at about the age of 60. The portrait has been extensively reproduced and has become an iconic representation of Leonardo as a polymath or "Renaissance Man". Despite this, some historians and scholars disagree as to the true identity of the sitter.
The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle and the Struggles for the Soul of Western Civilization is the seventh non-fiction book written by American historian Arthur L. Herman. The book contrasts the philosophical approaches of Plato and Aristotle directly, then examines changes in political, religious, and philosophical views in western societies from the days of ancient Greece to the present in the context of their relationship to Platonic or Aristotelian viewpoints.
↑ Jones and Penny, p. 74: "The execution of the School of Athens ... probably followed that of the Parnassus."
↑ See Giorgio Vasari, "Raphael of Urbino", in Lives of the Artists, vol. I: "In each of the four circles he made an allegorical figure to point the significance of the scene beneath, towards which it turns. For the first, where he had painted philosophy, astrology, geometry and poetry agreeing with theology, is a woman representing knowledge, seated in a chair supported on either side by a goddess Cybele, with the numerous breasts ascribed by the ancients to Diana Polymastes. Her garment is of four colours, representing the four elements, her head being the colour of fire, her bust that of air, her thighs that of earth, and her legs that of water." For further clarification, and introduction to more subtle interpretations, see E. H. Gombrich, "Raphael's Stanza della Segnatura and the Nature of Its Symbolism", in Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1975).
↑ "To each what is due (jus suum cuique)" quotes from the definition of justice in Justinian, Institutes, book 1. See Anonymous (1840). "Review of J. D. Passavant, Rafael von Urbino und sein Vater Giovanni Santi". The Quarterly Review. 66: 1 at 29.
↑ M. Smolizza, Rafael y el Amor. La Escuela de Atenas como protréptico a la filosofia, in 'Idea y Sentimiento. Itinerarios por el dibujo de Rafael a Cézanne', Barcelona, 2007, pp. 29–77. [A review of the main interpretations proposed in the last two centuries.]
↑ According to Vasari, "Raphael received a hearty welcome from Pope Julius, and in the chamber of the Segnatura he painted the theologians reconciling Philosophy and Astrology with Theology, including portraits of all the wise men of the world in dispute."
↑ Salmi, Mario; Becherucci, Luisa; Marabottini, Alessandro; Tempesti, Anna Forlani; Marchini, Giuseppe; Becatti, Giovanni; Castagnoli, Ferdinando; Golzio, Vincenzo (1969). The Complete Work of Raphael. New York: Reynal and Co., William Morrow and Company. p.379.
↑ Salmi, Mario; Becherucci, Luisa; Marabottini, Alessandro; Tempesti, Anna Forlani; Marchini, Giuseppe; Becatti, Giovanni; Castagnoli, Ferdinando; Golzio, Vincenzo (1969). The Complete Work of Raphael. New York: Reynal and Co., William Morrow and Company. pp.377, 422.
↑ Ph. Lauer; Ch. Picard (1957). "Reviewed Work: Les Statues Ptolémaïques du Sarapieion de Memphis". Archaeological Institute of America. 61 (2): 211–215. doi:10.2307/500375. JSTOR500375.
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