Back in 2006 I went to Rome, vis­it­ed the tombs of Keats and Shel­ley, sat on the Span­ish Steps, had my cam­era stolen on the sub­way (hol­i­days are often mixed affairs, after all), dis­cov­ered a pen­chant for liquorice liqueur, mar­velled at the Col­i­se­um, got a sore neck look­ing up at St Mark’s Cathe­dral and the glo­ri­ous Sis­tine Chapel…and spent some time in con­tem­pla­tion of the famous fres­co that is the sub­ject of today’s blog. The School of Athens is one of four wall fres­coes in the Stan­za del­la Seg­natu­ra, the apart­ment in the Vat­i­can palace whose walls and ceil­ing were paint­ed by Raphael between 1508 and 1511.

Raphael (Raf­fael­lo Sanzio da Urbino) was com­mis­sioned by Pope Julius II, the same man who also com­mis­sioned Michelan­ge­lo to paint the near­by Sis­tine Chapel (this Pope clear­ly knew his painters), and, like that work, the Stan­za del­la Seg­natu­ra is an embod­i­ment of all that was great about the clas­si­cal spir­it of the Renais­sance. It’s hard to think of a bet­ter sym­bol for the mar­riage of art, phi­los­o­phy, and sci­ence that was the hall­mark of the Ital­ian Renais­sance than The School of Athens.

The fres­coes depict the themes of phi­los­o­phy, the­ol­o­gy, lit­er­a­ture and jus­tice, and per­son­i­fi­ca­tions of the same four themes dec­o­rate the ceil­ing. The School of Athens, rep­re­sent­ing phi­los­o­phy, is notable for its accu­rate per­spec­ti­val pro­jec­tion, which Raphael learned from Leonar­do da Vin­ci (whose like­ness Raphael used for the cen­tral fig­ure of this paint­ing, Pla­to). The two cen­tral fig­ures are Pla­to and Aris­to­tle, each hold­ing a copy of one of their books (Plato’s Timaeus and Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics), and around them is an assort­ment of fig­ures from the worlds of phi­los­o­phy and the nat­ur­al sci­ences, includ­ing Socrates, Pythago­ras, Euclid and Ptole­my. If you’re ever in Rome, be sure to vis­it the Stan­za del­la Seg­natu­ra, but do look after your cam­era!