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The School of Athens

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The School of Athens or "Scuola di Atene" in Italian is one of the most famous paintings by the Italian Renaissance artist Raphael. It was painted between 1510 and 1511 as a 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. The Stanza della Segnatura was the first of the rooms to be decorated, and The School of Athens the second painting to be finished, after La disputa. The picture has long been seen as "Raphael's masterpiece and the perfect embodiment of the classical spirit of the High Renaissance.

The painting

The subject of the painting is an imagined convocation of famous Greek philosophers. Commentators have long suggested that nearly every great Greek philosopher and scientist can be found within the painting, but figuring out who exactly is depicted in the painting is extremely difficult because Raphael did not explicitly state who the figures were supposed to represent, and no contemporaneous documents explain the painting. Compounding the problem, Raphael had to create a whole set of iconography to allude to the various scientists and philosophers in the painting, which had not previously existed. Nevertheless, there is widespread agreement on the identity of certain select figures within the painting.

The figures

The identity of some of the philosophers in the picture, such as Plato or Aristotle, is uncontroversial. But scholars disagree on many of the other figures. According to Lahanas, they are usually identified as follows:

Center figures (14 and 15)

In the center of the painting, in front of the painting's vanishing point, are the two undisputed main subjects, Plato on the left and his student Aristotle on the right. Both figures are holding copies of their own books in their left hands. Plato is holding Timaeus and Aristotle is holding his Nicomachean Ethics. In addition, the two figures are gesturing in different directions. Plato has his right arm pointing to the heavens, which is a reference to Plato's ideas of the The Forms. In contrast, Aristotle gestures to the earth, representing his belief in knowledge through empirical observation and experience.

Supposedly, Plato was designed to resemble Leonardo da Vinci.

The setting

The building is in the shape of a Greek Cross, which some have suggested was intended to show a harmony between pagan philosophy and Christian theology. The architecture of the building was inspired by the work of Bramante, who according to Vasari helped Raphael with the architecture in the picture. Some have suggested that the building itself was intended to be an advance view of St. Peter's Basilica. There are two sculptures in the background. The one on the left is the god Apollo holding a lyre. Apollo is the god of the sun, medicine/healing, light, truth, archery, and music. The sculpture on the right is Athena, in her Roman guise as Minerva. Athena was the goddess of wisdom.

Reproductions

The Victoria and Albert Museum has a rectangular version over 4 metres by 8 metres in size, painted on canvas, dated 1755 by Anton Raphael Mengs on display in the eastern Cast Court.

A reproduction of the fresco can be seen in the auditorium of Old Cabell Hall at the University of Virginia. Produced in 1900 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.

Another reproduction, by Neide, is in the Königsberg Cathedral, Kaliningrad.

More recently the image was used by the band Guns N' Roses for their 1991 albums Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II. Extracts of the image, chiefly the two figures to the left of Plotinus (figure 17), were extracted by New York artist Mark Kostabi for the cover art.

Another reproduction can be found in the University of North Carolina at Asheville's Highsmith University Student Union.

One of the newest reproductions of this painting can be found in the seminar room at Baylor University's Brooks College.

References

External links

Gallery



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Last updated on Thursday March 13, 2008 at 22:00:17 PDT (GMT -0700)
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