RAPHAEL'S SCHOOL OF ATHENS LEFT SIDE

RAPHAEL'S SCHOOL OF ATHENS

The School of Athens is a painting that is meant to illustrate the abstract notion of PHILOSOPHY
in a room painted for Pope Julius II between 1509-11 in the Vatican in Rome. Each wall of the room is devoted to a different discipline; the other three walls have paintings with the subjects of THEOLOGY, POETRY, and LAW.  In order to understand Raphael's School of Athens painting, identification of the most important philosophical figures is important.

In the next image I have written the identifications in black letters over the heads of the main people in the scene.

(Scroll to the right to see the entire scene.) Raphael imagines the wall of PHILOSOPHY as a gathering of great minds from Ancient Greece, Spain, Persia, and contemporary Rome. As I have explained in the blog on the architecture of the scene, Raphael divides the groups of philosophers into two types: IDEALISTS and REALISTS. The IDEALISTS are on the left of the central vertical line and the REALISTS are on the right.

 on the left:                                                                       on the right:

PLATO (LEONARDO)                                                   ARISTOTLE
SOCRATES                                                                     DIOGENES
ALCIBIADES                                                                 ALEXANDER the GREAT
EPICURUS                                                                      ZOROASTER
AVERROES                                                                     EUCLID (BRAMANTE)
PYTHAGORAS                                                               PTOLEMY
FRANCESCO MARIA DELLA ROVERE                     SODOMA
PARMENIDES                                                                 RAPHAEL
HERACLITUS (MICHELANGELO)

(scroll back up if the letters are not large enough)

This division of the scene in two is emphasized by the two main central characters, PLATO and
ARISTOTLE, who walk together under three central arches, one above and two behind them.                                      

PLATO, whose head is a portrait of Leonardo da Vinci, points upward with his right hand to the world of ideas that lies outside the realm of reality. With his left hand he holds his own book,
TIMEO, the TIMAEUS, in which he discusses the world of ideas and the notion of perfection
in all aspects of human life, especially the eternal nature of the human soul and the perfect universe in which humans could live. Plato was a Greek philosopher (428-347 B.C.) who was a pupil of Socrates; he writes down the ideas which he remembers from lectures given by Socrates in Athens;
because he is responsible for the writing, he is more influential on later thinkers than Socrates himself.

 

 For the portrait of Plato, Raphael seems to have relied on Leonardo's red-chalk self-portrait drawing that is now in Turin in the Royal Library. It
is not an identical copy, but
the three-quarter view is the
same and features such as
the long nose, mustache, and
beard are similar. Raphael's
Leonardo seems more worried and has a nose with
straighter lines at the end.

Aristotle holds his right hand parallel to the ground and out in front of him, to suggest that he is a
REALIST, that his philosophical thinking is grounded in the earth and what is able to be observed
in the world. He holds with his left hand his own book of the Nichomachaean Ethics, here labelled
as ETICA.

In the book Aristotle discusses moral philosophy, what kind of behavior is acceptable here on earth.  Some scholars have suggested that Aristotle's face is also a portrait, perhaps Giuliano da Sangallo.












PLATO and ARISTOTLE seem to be talking to each other and speaking about the differences in their viewpoints. In this blog entry we will limit ourselves to the left side of the painting, to the IDEALISTS. WHO ARE THE IDEALISTS?

SOCRATES (470-399 B.C.) was Plato's teacher, as we have said, and he is shown to the left at the top of the stairs, ticking off logical arguments with his fingers:
 
Socrates' facial features are known because of ancient busts of him, this one on the right in the Louvre.
 
 He is easy to identify because he has a nose
like the actor Karl Malden:

To the left of him in the group and listening intently is a man dressed in warrior armor, with helmet and sword; he is ALCIBIADES (450-404 B.C.,) a Greek general who was a great follower of SOCRATES.

Although technically Alcibiades is not a writer, he was such an avid devotee of Socrates' ideas of
perfect government and ideal life, that he is not out of place here next to the great teacher.
Below the steps on the left side of the painting we have, from left to right:
EPICURUS  AVERROES  DELLA ROVERE  PYTHAGORAS  PARMENIDES and HERACLITUS
EPICURUS (341-270 B.C.) wears grape vines in his hair and seems to be checking on a recipe for good food, the philosophy of pursuit of perfect pleasure being his IDEAL; his belief in an eternal universe places him among the IDEALISTS.

AVERROES (Ibn Rushd, 1126-1198) leans to the right in a turban, and at first glance, seems to be looking over Pythagoras' shoulder to see what he is writing, but in a closer view, he is seen to be staring at Parmenides' writing, which makes more sense. AVERROES was a Muslim philosopher from 12th century Spain who is interested in the immortality of intellectual life, so he is appropriate on the side of the idealists, and since PARMENIDES (born 515 B.C. in Greece) was a believer in existence as eternal and unchanging, they make an appropriate pairing.

 

The standing figure in white in between Averroes and Parmenides has been identified variously as Francesco Maria della Rovere, the nephew of Pope Julius II or as Hypatia, a female philosopher from Alexandria. Since the only women in the fresco seem to be bas-reliefs or statues, I find it unlikely this person is female. But it is equally hard to establish this as a portrait of Francesco Maria della Rovere, whose portrait was painted by Raphael 5 years earlier with dark hair:

As FRANCESCO MARIA DELLA ROVERE (1490-1538) was made Captain of the Papal Armies in 1509, just when this painting was being painted, it makes sense that Raphael would include Julius' nephew as a compliment to his patron, and the fact that he stands just below the other great ancient general, Alcibiades, suggests he is placed on this side for that reason.

But what qualifies Francesco Maria for a post among the idealistic philosophers? Did he have idealistic plans for Julius' role in the Vatican States? Another scholar may shed light on this identification.

Moving to the bottom row on this left side of the painting, we find PYTHAGORAS.
PYTHAGORAS (570-495 B.C.)was an ancient Greek philosopher who wanted to explore PURE MATH and PURE MUSIC, especially the concept of how to achieve PERFECT HARMONY through certain intervals in musical notes (intervals we see depicted on the blackboard in front of him):
                                                                   

And the last person to be painted on the whole wall of the fresco, below Plato and to the right of Parmenides, is the philosopher HERACLITUS, who is given stone-cutter's boots, a block of marble to lean on, and an inkwell for the writing he is doing on a piece of paper on the block.

HERACLITUS (535-475 B.C.)  believed in flux and reflux, the eternal quality of change; his famous phrase was, "You never step in the same river twice." Perhaps his left boot is thrust forward in the picture plane to remind us of his saying. He is also a portrait of  MICHELANGELO (1475-1564,) the sculptor, the stone cutter, who was a poet, hence the writing. Vasari tells us that Bramante let Raphael into the Sistine Chapel to see the painting that Michelangelo had finished there, and after Raphael's realization that Michelangelo was a great painter of large, muscular figures, he comes back and inserts this figure to pay homage to the man who had been painting down the hall. (The plaster layer of this section is added later, which supports this theory.) The head certainly resembles bronze portraits of Michelangelo by his pupil, Daniele da Volterra:

In Raphael's version of him he looks as though he is thinking of a word for his poem, but

when we zoom in, he is actually eyeing the partial block of marble under the foot of Parmenides,

and the block seems to have a caricature of a fish drawn on the side of it:

Raphael understood that even when painting, Michelangelo wanted to be sculpting. Even in the sonnet he writes about painting the Sistine ceiling, Michelangelo says, "non sendo in loco bon ne io pittore."("not being in a good place and not being a painter" - my trans.) Raphael is so taken with the grandeur of Michelangelo that he paints him twice in the room, once here and once on the wall of Poetry:

Is Michelangelo a philosopher, yes, insofar as his poetry is philosophical and his artworks tackle large ideas. Is he an IDEALIST? Yes, his desire for perfection makes him irascible and difficult to interact with, and he expects much of himself and also of others; he wants perfection in life and in his art. Raphael knew the greatness of his mind and of his abilities in painting, sculpture, and architecture, and he recorded him as a colossal figure at the front and near center of his composition:

He is larger than Plato and Aristotle, larger than Diogenes and Parmenides; Raphael saw the vast talent of this man and his thinking and presented him physically as a giant among the giants.

 

He dominates both sides of the painting.
And now we will turn, in another blog, to the right side and the philosopher-realists.