Point of view analysis of Raphael's School of Athens

Raphael's School Of Athens:

A critical review of three articles

Date due (Month date, year)

Raphael's School of Athens:

A critical review of three articles

Alkholy, Inas. "The Presence of Secular Books in Raphael's Fresco the School of Athens."

Comparative Islamic Studies, 2.1 (2006) 51-65.

Bell, Daniel Orth. "New identifications in Raphael's School of Athens." Art Bulletin.

Most, Glenn. "The School of Athens and its Pre-text." Critical Inquiry. 23.1 (1996): 145-154.

The reverence in Raphael's fresco the School of Athens for ancient, pagan learning has been clearly evident to Western art historians for centuries. Raphael's classic work is seen as paradigmatic of how the symbolic language of Western art shifted from a purely Christian and Biblical focus and came to reflect the new Renaissance era interest in and access to classical philosophy, particularly neo-Platonic philosophy. However, according to Inas Alkholy's 2006 article "The Presence of Secular Books in Raphael's Fresco the School of Athens" from Comparative Islamic Studies, Raphael's work shows a reverence for great figures of all faiths -- pagan and Islamic, and this is often forgotten even by contemporary art historians.

As well as the Greek philosophers Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates and the Greek mathematicians Euclid and Pythagoras in the painting, there is also Ibn Rushd, a great Islamic philosopher and physician. During the medieval era, the Arab world was the bastion of higher scientific learning, in contrast to the superstitions mindset manifest in much of the Christian world. The rebirth of the Renaissance was linked to a rebirth of interest in the individual, philosophy, and science -- which had long been a continuing interest of Muslim scholars, long before the 'rebirth' of classical learning.

What we call today 'the scientific method' originated in the Islamic world, and Arabic was considered one of the languages men of culture were supposed to understand, to read the great books of the era. Alkholy states that Raphael's masterpiece is visual testimony to the importance of the Arab world and it is important not to 'write out' the Islamic element of the School of Athens, with our own, modern perspective that views Islam in a different light. "During the Renaissance era, art was strongly tied to knowledge; artists and commissioners were humanists, who knew a great deal of the purpose of art and secular knowledge. The School of Athens presents the value of secular knowledge through the depiction of ancient and contemporary masters, students and books. The fresco is therefore an allegory of two things: education and Italy as a secular state" that was capable of learning from the past and from other cultures.

Daniel Orth Bell's 1995 article "New identifications in Raphael's School of Athens" from Art Bulletin is a more generalized analysis of the iconography of the work. In contrast to Alkholy's confident analysis of its meaning, Bell states that the symbolic language of Raphael's neo-Platonism is more ambiguous. Although the work is evidently allegorical, Raphael left no notes specifying what he meant each figure to represent, although certain conventional identities are given to each figure, according to most essays on the work: bald Socrates, for example, and Zoroaster holding a globe. But why is Socrates, widely considered the greatest philosopher of all time, positioned so far off in the crowd of figures, without any iconography to indicate his identity?

Some believe that the military figure is Socrates, not the bald figure. But given that Pericles, the great Athenian statesman, was often depicted in a helmet to hide his oddly-shaped head, Bell is inclined to disagree with this hypothesis. Bell believes that the proximity of a cup (a reference to Socrates' death by hemlock) next to a figure widely identified as Diogenes the Cynic is more persuasive. The resemblance of two nearby younger figures who may represent Socrates' students Crito and Apollodorus and the proximity of this figure to Plato (through whose teachings we primarily know Socrates) and Aristotle (the other major Greek philosophical figure influential in medieval thought) support this hypothesis. This identification further elucidates some of Raphael's philosophy, namely that through his act of self-sacrifice for philosophy "Socrates was an important precursor to Christ.

" Bell's article underlines the thinking behind Raphael's masterpiece. It is not simply an imagined portrait of famous people; rather it is a philosophical treatise, in symbolic form, of what it meant to be a great man, as embodied in these different figures.

Glenn Most, in his 1996 article "The School of Athens and its Pre-text" from Critical Inquiry agrees that the central question of the School of Athens is "How can an artist represent pictorially an intellectual activity like philosophy? In the School of Athens, Raphael chooses to do so by depicting the manifold set of ratiocinative and discursive activities performed on a sunny day in a splendid building by a large number of adult male philosophers… because Raphael's image has embedded itself so deeply in our visual unconscious. It requires an effort of the historical imagination to recognize that this was not an inevitable, or even a likely, way to represent philosophy in the first decade of the sixteenth century -- indeed, that the fundamental conception of the School of Athens is entirely without precedent in the tradition of European art.

" in doing so, Glen Most suggests, Raphael created the symbolic ideal of what modern, Western culture now identifies as the iconic image of 'the philosopher.' The obviousness is retroactive, and to read the painting with the eyes of a medieval observer, one must not take the identities for granted in a physical sense like Bell stresses, but also the fact that certain identities of particular philosophers were selected and others were excluded by Raphael. Glenn Most stresses that it is not simply that Raphael was selecting figures from the great cannon of philosophy, art, history, and science of the ancient world -- he was also creating that cannon in his painting. Now, we cannot think of what looks like a Greek philosopher without thinking of Raphael, and we define what constitutes the cannon of ancient philosophy at least in part because of our vision of the past, as seen through the eyes of the Renaissance era art's work.