Raphael's School of Athens: Renaissance Humanism Explored

Introduction: A Secular Vision for a Renaissance Pope

One of the great Renaissance artist Raphael's works for Pope Julius II was not a religious piece of art, but a work that evoked 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 individuals whose work provided the intellectual cornerstone for so many of the Renaissance's great scientific and artistic innovations. Interestingly, Raphael left no notes about the painting regarding the identity of the various philosophers depicted, suggesting that he assumed his audience would already know who they were. The sixteenth-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 of symbolism and demonstrates substantial innovation in making a crowd scene comprehensible, dynamic, ideal, and yet palpably human.

Sixty-six philosophers make up the work, and — significantly, in terms of the Renaissance's emphasis on the human — they are more prominent than the symbolic and idealized representation of "Dame Philosophy" on the throne before them (Most 1996, 155). Although she is seated on high, she appears more shadowy compared to the vivid crowd scene and its dynamic interactions below her.

Identifying the Philosophers: Ambiguity and Visual Delight

Subsequent scholars have found the representations more opaque in their identities and more open to interpretation. They point out that when Raphael created 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 the 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 from whole cloth, and to his credit many of those images are so indelible they have become fixed in the cultural consciousness, serving as fodder for everything from subsequent art to parodied advertisements. We assume Plato looks like Raphael's Plato, even though we have no evidence from Plato's own era to suggest what Plato actually looked like. The work is sublimely concrete as well as idealized in the indelible images it creates — it was meant to be a visualization of knowledge, a merging of art and philosophy across time, anachronistically bringing together philosophers from different ages so that Raphael's art could enter into dialogue with ancient thought.

Plato, Aristotle, and Key Symbolic Figures

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 upward, probably in reference to his philosophy's emphasis 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 for the contemporary artists Raphael used as models is another point of speculation among many scholars — one figure, for instance, is 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 versus Platonism's idealism — clutches his volume on Ethics. Aristotle holds his palm flat, facing the earth, as if grasping something terrestrial. Other clearly representative images include Pythagoras, the philosopher of the "music of the spheres," who studies a tablet on harmonic proportions. The founder of geometry, Euclid, holds 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 from 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 viewer's mind, rather than the impression that they are merely ordinary human beings. The glorification of their human achievements is the aim.