Raphael's School of Athens: A Walking Catalogue of Ancient Philosophy

Between 1509 and 1511, a twenty-six-year-old painter from the small Italian town of Urbino completed a fresco on a single wall of a small library on the second floor of the Apostolic Palace in Rome. The library belonged to Pope Julius II, who used it as his personal study, and the room would become known as the Stanza della Segnatura — the room where the Pope's most important documents were signed. The fresco on the east wall shows around fifty philosophers, mathematicians, astronomers, and grammarians gathered under a vast vaulted hall that looks like the interior of a basilica. The painter was Raphael Sanzio. The picture has been called the School of Athens since the seventeenth century. It is the most concentrated piece of intellectual scenography produced by the Italian High Renaissance.

Raphael, The School of Athens (1509-11). Fresco, 500 × 770 cm. Stanza della Segnatura, Apostolic Palace, Rome. The east wall of Pope Julius II's personal library — a vast vaulted hall populated by around fifty philosophers of antiquity, several of them rendered as portraits of Raphael's living contemporaries.

The room — the Stanza della Segnatura and its programme

The Stanza della Segnatura is a small room, roughly nine metres long and eight metres wide. The four walls and the ceiling were painted by Raphael and his workshop between 1508 and 1511 in a coordinated programme. Each wall represents one of the four faculties of human knowledge as the Renaissance organised them: Theology on the south wall (the Disputation of the Holy Sacrament), Philosophy on the east wall (the picture now called the School of Athens), Poetry on the west wall (the Parnassus), and Jurisprudence on the north wall. The ceiling shows the personifications of the four faculties as enthroned female figures, each holding the emblem of her discipline.

Raphael, Disputation of the Holy Sacrament (1509-10). Fresco, Stanza della Segnatura. The south wall of the same room — Theology rendered as a heavenly conclave of saints arranged in a half-circle above an earthly debate of Church Fathers. Theology and Philosophy were the two arts the small library was designed to balance.

The programme is the Renaissance synthesis at its most ambitious. The same room is asked to hold Christian theology and pagan philosophy as parallel forms of knowledge — to argue, by physical adjacency, that the truths of the Athenian philosophers and the truths of the Christian Church are two halves of the same enterprise. The Disputa on the south wall and the School of Athens on the east wall face each other across the room, which means anyone entering had Plato and Aristotle on one side and Christ and the Church Fathers on the other. The room was designed for a Pope who was also a humanist, and the pictures argue the humanist case.

Plato and Aristotle at the centre — the gesture that organises the picture

The two figures at the vanishing point of the picture are Plato and Aristotle. They walk forward together through the long perspectival hall, and the picture is constructed to make their two gestures the most legible thing in it. Plato, on the left, points up — his right index finger extended toward the high vault, identifying the source of truth as the world of ideal forms above material reality. Aristotle, on the right, extends his hand outward, palm down — identifying the source of truth as the empirical world of the human senses spread out at chest height. Each carries a book in his other hand: Plato carries the Timaeus (his cosmological dialogue), Aristotle carries the Nicomachean Ethics (his treatise on practical philosophy).

The two gestures at the vanishing point of the fresco. Plato's finger pointing up identifies ideal forms above material reality; Aristotle's palm-down hand identifies the empirical world at chest height. The two-thousand-year debate of Western philosophy compressed into one pair of hands.

The gesture is the picture's diagram. The two-thousand-year argument between idealism and empiricism in Western philosophy is rendered as two hands of two old men walking through a hall. Around them, the picture distributes other philosophers in groups that radiate outward in two perceptible halves — Plato's followers on the left (the metaphysicians, the mathematicians of the abstract), Aristotle's followers on the right (the natural philosophers, the empirical observers). Pythagoras teaches a young man at the lower left of the picture; Euclid (or Archimedes — the identification has been debated for four centuries) demonstrates a geometric proof to a circle of students at the lower right. Ptolemy holds a terrestrial globe further right, with Zoroaster facing him holding a celestial globe — the natural sciences placed on Aristotle's side of the picture.

Heraclitus is Michelangelo — the picture's most famous portrait

Sitting alone on the bottom step of the foreground, his head propped on his left hand, his elbow on a block of marble, dressed in the boots and short tunic of a Tuscan stonecutter rather than the long robes of the philosophers around him, is the figure who has been identified since the sixteenth century as Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher of perpetual change. The figure is also, simultaneously, a portrait of Michelangelo Buonarroti, who was painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the next-but-one room while Raphael was painting the School of Athens. Michelangelo's face, his physical posture, his clothing, and even the marble block he leans on (the raw material of Michelangelo's first vocation, sculpture) are all rendered with documentary precision.

Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Creation of Adam (detail, 1511-12). Sistine Chapel ceiling, Apostolic Palace. Michelangelo was painting the Sistine ceiling in another room of the Vatican at exactly the same moment Raphael was painting the School of Athens. Raphael added Michelangelo's portrait — as the brooding Heraclitus alone on the foreground steps — late in the fresco, after seeing what Michelangelo was doing.

This portrait is unique in two ways. First, the figure of Heraclitus does not appear in Raphael's preparatory cartoon for the fresco — the large-scale preparatory drawing that survives in a Milan collection. Heraclitus was painted directly into the fresco, in the wet plaster of a final giornata or day's work, almost certainly in 1511, after Raphael had been allowed to see the Sistine ceiling in its still-unfinished state. The figure is in a slightly different colour register from the rest of the picture — heavier, more sculptural, more Michelangelesque — and the brushwork is recognisably influenced by Michelangelo's approach to muscular form. Raphael added his greatest rival as a tribute, in the rival's own style, after seeing what the rival was making in the next room. The gesture is one of the great moments of professional generosity in the history of European painting.

Raphael's self-portrait at the right edge

Raphael also painted himself into the fresco. Standing at the far right edge of the picture, in the group of Ptolemy and Zoroaster, looking out at the viewer over the shoulder of the painter Sodoma, is a young man in a dark cap. The face is the same face that appears in Raphael's signed self-portraits. The painter places himself, in other words, on the empirical-science side of the picture (Aristotle's side, the natural philosophers' side), and at its physical edge — at the boundary between the philosophical world inside the picture and the contemporary world of the viewer standing in the Stanza outside it.

The young man in the dark cap at the right edge of the picture, looking directly out at the viewer over the shoulder of the painter Sodoma, is Raphael himself. The placement — at the boundary between the philosophical world of the fresco and the contemporary world of the viewer — declares Raphael's relation to the picture's intellectual programme.

The self-portrait is restrained — Raphael painted himself smaller than the surrounding figures and partially hidden behind Sodoma, the slightly older painter who had originally been hired to decorate the Stanza before Julius II saw Raphael's work and gave him the whole commission instead. The arrangement is its own joke: the painter Raphael displaced from the room is given a head-and-shoulders portrait at the front of the group; the painter Raphael who did the work stands behind him, only visible because he looks at the viewer. The picture absorbs the political fact of Raphael's appointment into a small visual anecdote.

Raphael, Madonna painter — the other half of his work

The School of Athens is one half of Raphael's mature work. The other half — the half he is now equally famous for — is the Madonnas. Between roughly 1505 and his death in 1520, Raphael painted around forty distinct images of the Virgin Mary, almost all of them small to medium oil panels for private devotional use, ranging from the early Madonna del Granduca (Florence, c. 1505) to the late Sistine Madonna (Dresden, 1512) — the last of which was painted in the same year Raphael was finishing his work in the Stanza.

Raphael, Sistine Madonna (1512). Oil on canvas, 265 × 196 cm. A Dresden collection. The Madonna commissioned for the church of San Sisto in Piacenza, painted in the same year Raphael was completing the Stanza della Segnatura. The two cherubs at the bottom of the picture — added by Raphael as architectural support for the kneeling figures — became the most reproduced detail of any Renaissance painting in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Sistine Madonna was painted in 1512 for the high altar of the small Lombard church of San Sisto in Piacenza, commissioned by Pope Julius II as a memorial to his uncle Sixtus IV (the kneeling figure on the left is Saint Sixtus, the patron of the church). The two small cherubs leaning on the parapet at the bottom of the painting — added by Raphael as architectural support for the kneeling figures above — became, in the nineteenth century, perhaps the most reproduced single detail of any Renaissance painting. The full picture is now in a Dresden collection. Looking at the School of Athens and the Sistine Madonna together is the best way to see what Raphael was doing in his mature work: he could organise fifty figures across a vaulted hall with mathematical precision, and he could organise four figures and two cherubs in front of a green curtain with the same precision applied at a different scale.

What the picture meant in the 1510s

The School of Athens is the founding image of what art historians now call the High Renaissance — the brief period, roughly 1500 to 1520, during which Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael were all working simultaneously in central Italy and producing pictures that contemporaries already recognised as the consummate expression of three centuries of Italian painting. Leonardo finished the Mona Lisa in 1503. Michelangelo painted the Sistine ceiling between 1508 and 1512. Raphael painted the Stanza della Segnatura between 1508 and 1511. All three projects overlap by years. All three painters were in personal contact with each other through the patronage networks of the Roman court.

Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa (c. 1503-19). Oil on poplar, 77 × 53 cm. A Paris collection. The third of the High Renaissance's three central works, contemporary with Raphael's Stanza and Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling. Raphael saw Leonardo's work in Florence in 1504-08, before his move to Rome, and the soft sfumato of his early Madonnas comes directly from this study.

The School of Athens is the picture that consolidates the three. It includes Leonardo as Plato (the central pointing figure has been identified as Leonardo since the sixteenth century — the long nose, the high forehead, the curly hair and beard match Leonardo's surviving portraits), Michelangelo as Heraclitus, and Raphael himself in the Ptolemy group at the right edge. The picture is a private joke at the centre of Western art: Raphael has painted the most ambitious image of ancient philosophy ever attempted in the Italian Renaissance, and the picture's hidden contents include the three painters who were, at the moment the picture was painted, in the process of inventing High Renaissance painting itself. The fresco names itself, in code, as the work of the same generation that is depicting the philosophers it contains.

Key takeaways

• Raphael painted the School of Athens between 1509 and 1511 as the east wall of the Stanza della Segnatura, the small library Pope Julius II used as his personal study on the second floor of the Apostolic Palace in Rome. The picture is one of four walls in a coordinated programme covering Theology, Philosophy, Poetry, and Jurisprudence.

• The two figures at the picture's vanishing point are Plato (left, finger up — ideal forms above material reality) and Aristotle (right, palm down — the empirical world at chest height). The picture is a diagram of the two-thousand-year argument between idealism and empiricism in Western philosophy, rendered as two hands.

• The brooding figure alone on the foreground steps, dressed as a stonecutter rather than a philosopher, is Heraclitus — and is also a portrait of Michelangelo Buonarroti, who was painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling in the next-but-one room at the same moment. Raphael added the figure late in the fresco, after seeing the Sistine ceiling, as a tribute in the rival's own style.

• Plato is widely identified as a portrait of Leonardo da Vinci, whose long nose, high forehead, and curly grey beard match Leonardo's surviving self-portraits. The School of Athens therefore contains portraits of the three central figures of the High Renaissance — Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael himself (in the Ptolemy group at the right edge).

• Raphael's self-portrait is partially hidden behind the painter Sodoma, who had originally been hired to decorate the Stanza before Julius II saw Raphael's work and gave him the whole commission instead. The arrangement is its own visual joke about the politics of the commission.

• The other half of Raphael's mature work is the roughly forty Madonnas he painted between 1505 and his death in 1520. The Sistine Madonna of 1512, painted in the same year Raphael was finishing the Stanza, is the picture whose two foreground cherubs became the most reproduced single detail of any Renaissance painting in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

• The School of Athens is the consolidating image of the High Renaissance — the period 1500-1520 during which Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael were all working simultaneously in central Italy. The picture's hidden contents include all three painters and effectively names itself, in code, as the work of the same generation that is depicting the philosophers it contains.

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