Raphael\'s Painting School of Athens

Raphael's painting "School of Athens" 1509-11

Raphael's triumph of Renaissance humanism and Neo-Platonic thought

One of the great Renaissance artist Raphael's works for Pope Julius II was not a religious piece of art, but a work that mimicked classical antiquity. The great painting the School of Athens depicts an idealized vision of great, classical Greek philosophers and scientists interacting with one another before a symbolic representation of 'Dame Philosophy.' All of the figures represent the people whose work was to provide the intellectual cornerstone for so much of the Renaissance's great scientific and artistic innovations. Interestingly, Raphael left no notes about the painting as to the identity of the various philosophers depicted, suggesting that it was assumed that his audience would know who they were. 16th century commentator and biographer Giorgio Vasari said that nearly every Greek philosopher and ancient scientist of note can be found in the painting if one looks closely enough (Bell 1995). The painting was seen as a triumph both of symbolism and shows substantial innovations in making a crowd scene comprehensible, dynamic, ideal and yet palpably human.

But subsequent students have found the representations more opaque in their identities and more open to interpretation. They point out that when Raphael crated the work, there was no established artistic convention for what these individuals looked like -- after all, these were the days before photography, and the great philosophers, unlike the gods, were seldom subjects of great art. Finding out the identity of the figures may have been part of the intentional visual delight or 'puzzle' of the painting. Out of necessity, Raphael had to use his imagination to create images out of whole cloth, and to his credit many of the images are so indelible they have become fixed in the cultural consciousness, fodder for everything from subsequent art to parodies advertisements. We assume Plato looks like Raphael's Plato, even though we have no clues from Plato's own era to suggest what Plato actually looked like. The work is sublimely concrete as well as idealized in terms of the indelible images it creates -- the work was meant to be a visualization of knowledge, a merging together of art and philosophy across time, anachronistically bringing together philosophers from across the ages so Raphael's art could be in dialogue with ancient thought. Sixty-six philosophers make up the work, and, significantly in terms of the Renaissance's emphasis on the human, they are more predominant than the symbolic and idealized representation of 'Dame Philosophy' on the throne before them (Most 1996, 155). Although she is seated on high, she looks more shadowy compared to the vivid crowd scene, with its dynamic interactions below her.

Some figures are easier to identify than others. Plato, for example, holds a copy of one of his most famous works, the dialogue Timaeus. He is shown pointing upwards, probably in reference to his philosophy's stress on the ethereal world of heavenly, pure forms. Raphael chose to honor Leonardo da Vinci by using the artist as his physical model for this bearded, rather aesthetic-looking Plato. Searching the figures to see what fellow artists Raphael as models is another point of speculation of many scholars -- for example, one of the figures thought to be based on Michelangelo -- and is said to be suffering from gout (Espinel 1999)!

In contrast, to Plato's heavenly gaze, Aristotle, with his polar-opposite focus on practical, empirical knowledge vs. Platonism's idealism, clutches his volume on Ethics. Aristotle holds his palm flat out, facing the earth as if grasping something terrestrial. Other clearly representative images are the philosopher of the 'music of the spheres,' Pythagoras, who studies a tablet on harmonic proportions. The founder of geometry, Euclid has a compass and Ptolemy holds a globe (Joost-Gaugier 1997). Some of these implements, particularly the globe, look more like objects from Raphael's era than the subject's own time. Raphael's images are anatomically correct and striking, but historical and physical realism is not his goal, instead he wishes to create a sense of idealism about these men in the gazer's mind, not the sense that they are just ordinary human beings. Glorification of their human achievements is the aim.

The meshing together of different figures from history shows the symbolic nature of the work -- a figure alternately attributed as Diogenes the Cynic or Socrates sits on the ground, although Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates, for example, never would have been alive during the same time period. Support for the figure being Diogenes rather than Socrates has been found in the fact that he is prone, and alone, which seems to suggest Diogenes' status as an antisocial Cynic -- he also called himself a 'dog.' However, the painting seems to depict in chronological order in the development of ancient philosophy, of the viewer moves his or her gaze from foreground to background and from left to right. This would suggest that the figure is Socrates. The bowl besides the lying figure if it is Socrates could symbolically signify his drinking of hemlock also suggests the death of Christ. Raphael, a Neo-Platonist in his philosophy, thus gave particular importance to Socrates' martyrdom (Bell 1995).

The artwork, as a glorification of the human, is sublimely Renaissance in nature, and typical of the period but it is also unique in the way that it celebrates philosophers and their intellectual arts, not simply symbolic figures of Greek and Roman gods and goddesses or abstract values. It shows Raphael's willingness to honor the intellectual legacy of the classical past. The male figures even when they engage with people whom they could not have known in life, look like vibrant and real figures, negotiating what it means to be human and what it means to understand the world. The image is exciting, and makes learning and human inquiry a worthy subject of art, equally as much as beauty. Its title, the School of Athens, and its panoramic gaze on many eras suggest that this type of searching has occurred over a long period of time. Athens itself was a school of knowledge, and the classical world has much to teach us. The painting's attitude is what is innovative, as well as its detail and depth of perspective.

Underlining the new broad-mindedness of the period, classical iconography representing the search of man for the truth was even embraced by the Pope, not just by artists. This type of humanistic, anatomically correct representation would have been unthinkable earlier, both in its images as well as its iconography. It is still exciting art because it creates the feeling of being alive in ancient Athens, watching the embodied philosophers at work, and helps bring their thoughts to life. They are not beautiful, yet seem vividly alive and interesting to the eye. The challenging, puzzle-like nature of playing 'guess who' are the different philosophers adds to the visual delight of the painting. The painting is an intellectual puzzle as well as is about men who enjoyed wrestling with intellectual puzzles.