School of Athens

School of Athens, fresco (1508–11) painted by artist Raphael, in the Stanza della Segnatura, a room in Pope Julius II’s private apartments in the Vatican. It is perhaps the most famous of all of Raphael’s paintings and one of the most significant artworks of the Renaissance.

Raphael was called to Rome toward the end of 1508 by Julius II at the suggestion of the architect Donato Bramante. At this time Raphael was little known in Rome, but the young man soon made a deep impression on the volatile Julius and the papal court, and his authority as a master grew day by day. His first task in the city was to paint a cycle of frescoes in a suite of medium-sized rooms (later called the Stanze di Raffaello [Raphael’s Rooms]) in the Vatican papal apartments in which Julius lived and worked. The Stanza della Segnatura (1508–11) and Stanza d’Eliodoro (1512–14) were decorated practically entirely by Raphael himself; the frescoes in the Stanza dell’Incendio (1514–17) and the Sala di Costantino (1517–25), though designed by Raphael, were largely executed by his numerous assistants and pupils.

The theme of the frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura, the most famous room, was the historical justification of the power of the Roman Catholic Church through Neoplatonic philosophy. The School of Athens and the Disputa are on the larger walls and the Parnassus and Cardinal Virtues on the smaller walls. The two most important of these frescoes are the School of Athens and the Disputa. The Disputa shows a celestial vision of God and his prophets and apostles above a gathering of representatives, past and present, of the Roman Catholic Church and equates through its iconography the triumph of the church and the triumph of truth. The School of Athens is a complex allegory of secular knowledge, or philosophy, showing Plato and Aristotle surrounded by philosophers, past and present, in a splendid architectural setting; it illustrates the historical continuity of Platonic thought. Here Raphael fills an ordered and stable space with figures in a rich variety of poses and gestures, which he controls in order to make one group of figures lead to the next in an interweaving and interlocking pattern, bringing the eye to the central figures of Plato and Aristotle at the converging point of the perspectival space. The space in which the philosophers congregate is defined by the pilasters and barrel vaults of a great basilica that is said to be based on Bramante’s design for the new St. Peter’s in Rome. The general effect of the fresco is one of majestic calm, clarity, and equilibrium.

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At the centre of the School of Athens are Plato and Aristotle. The two men had different pursuits, Plato being engaged with such spiritual ideas as truth, beauty, and justice and Aristotle being concerned with worldly reality. These differences are evident in the painting. Plato, on the left, points skyward while holding a copy of Timaeus, and Aristotle gestures to the ground and props up a copy of his Ethics. Pythagoras, who believed that the world was conducted by mathematical laws, sits below, sketching geometry, and the arch pessimist Heraclitus—thought to be a portrait of Michelangelo, who was then at work on the Sistine ceiling—is passively writing on a bench of marble. Euclid is patiently teaching the next generation of students on the lower left, and Ptolemy, on the lower right, is prominently featured with his celestial spheres. Next to Ptolemy, Raphael included a portrait of himself, wearing a black beret and looking out at the viewers. The overall theme of the painting, and the whole room, is the synthesis and celebration of worldly (Greek) and spiritual (Christian) thinking.