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.
Most's postmodern analysis is an important reminder not to look at the School of Athens with the eyes of a modern critic and assume that the sense of history we bring to it, and our vision of pristine Greek philosophy, is how Raphael's contemporaries would have seen it. Bell's...
Raphael / Michelangelo / Donatello Raphael's School of Athens is considered a high point of humanism. We can understand this by considering some basic facts about the work: it is a fresco painting done on a wall in the Vatican, arguably the center of Christianity in the world, and yet it depicts a large number of figures, the vast majority of whom had never even heard the name "Jesus Christ." This
Beginning with the major arch of the Stanze that frames the entire piece, there recedes a series of concentric circles that focus down to the archway that frames the two central figures. This can be seen as a nearly literal rippling effect of the wisdom of these two great thinkers off into space, and into the mind of the viewer. Working from largest to smallest, we can see that
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
Art History Raphael's Career Raphael is one of the most renowned artists in modern human history. He is so famous that he is one of a small number of artists that they are only known by one name. His full name is Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino. His precise birthdate is contended, but it is agreed that he was born sometime in the spring during 1483, as the 15th century, as well as
We can consider 'The School of Athens' as a 'visualization of knowledge.'" in addition to Plato and Aristotle, Euclid and Pythagoras are present among others. Lahanas even suggests that the painting may be a reproduction of Plato's Academy. This concept would emphasize a commitment to learning, as well as an interest in antiquity and classical learning. The architecture depicted is a "modification of Bramante's first design for St. Peter
School of Athens is the most well-known of the frescoes painted by Raphael, an Italian Renaissance artist. Painted in two years from 1509-1511, Raphael painted the fresco as a commission where he had to decorate the Stanze di Raffaello rooms in the Apostolic Palace located in the Vatican. The fresco is meant to represent Philosophy and was finished after La Disputa, which represented theology on the opposite side. School
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