The School of Athens
The philosophers of antiquity gathered in a vast architectural setting. Plato points upwards towards the Ideas, Aristotle holds his hand out towards the real world. Several figures have the faces of Raphael’s contemporaries.
Plato is said to have been given Leonardo’s features, and Raphael has painted himself in at the far right.
Pope Julius II had Raphael repaint several rooms in his apartments in the Vatican. The School of Athens is in the Stanza della Segnatura, which was probably used as the pope’s library. The frescoes in the room were painted around 1509–1511. The walls depict four fields of knowledge: theology, philosophy, poetry and law. The School of Athens represents philosophy and faces the theological picture, the Disputa, on the opposite wall. Raphael was only just over twenty-five when he began, and the work made him one of the leading artists in Rome.
In the centre Plato and Aristotle walk side by side. Plato points upwards and holds his book, the Timaeus. Aristotle holds his hand out over the ground and carries his Ethics. The gestures are usually interpreted as the difference between Plato’s Ideas and Aristotle’s interest in the real world. Many other thinkers gather around them, but only some of them can be identified with certainty.
Diogenes lies half-stretched out on the steps. Pythagoras sits on the left, writing in a book. On the right a man with a pair of compasses bends over a tablet, usually interpreted as Euclid or Archimedes. According to Vasari he has the features of the architect Bramante. Some figures at the far right hold a celestial globe and a terrestrial globe, and among them a young man looks out at the viewer. He is usually identified as Raphael himself. Each figure has its own posture and gesture, and together they present conversation as the heart of philosophy.
In the foreground sits a gloomy man leaning on a block of marble and writing. He is usually called Heraclitus and is thought to have Michelangelo’s features. The figure does not appear in the surviving preparatory design, the cartoon, and was probably added after Raphael had seen Michelangelo’s ceiling paintings in the Sistine Chapel. That Plato was given Leonardo’s face is an old and common, but unproven, interpretation.
The architecture recalls the plans that Bramante was then drawing up for the new St Peter’s. Great vaults open to the sky, and statues of Apollo and Athena stand in the niches. The lines of the floor and the vaults converge near the hands of Plato and Aristotle. The composition is balanced and clear, with the figures in groups engaged in conversation. The figures have room without crowding, and the space gives an impression of calm order.
Raphael painted in true fresco on wet plaster and worked with large preparatory drawings. The cartoon for The School of Athens survives in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. It is one of the few full-scale preparatory designs to survive from the Renaissance.
The School of Athens became a model for academic art for several hundred years. It displays the ideals of the High Renaissance: harmony, clarity and respect for antiquity. It has been copied by generations of art students and is one of the most famous images in the Vatican Museums.