Inmaculada retweetledi
The most famous painting of the ancient Greek philosophers is full of hidden portraits of Renaissance artists.
The figure of Plato is Leonardo da Vinci. The brooding man writing alone on the marble block is Michelangelo. And in the corner, looking straight out at you, is the painter himself...
It is called the School of Athens, and Raphael painted it on the wall of the Pope's private apartments in the Vatican between 1509 and 1511. He was in his mid-twenties.
Across a vast painted hall, he gathered more than fifty of the greatest philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists of the ancient world into a single imagined gathering that never happened.
At the very center, beneath a soaring archway placed at the vanishing point so your eye is pulled straight to them, stand the two men who divided Western thought between them. On the left is Plato, white-haired, pointing one finger up toward the heavens, holding his book the Timaeus. Beside him is his student Aristotle, holding his Ethics and reaching his hand out flat toward the earth. In a single gesture, Raphael captured the whole argument: Plato pointing to the world of ideas above, Aristotle to the physical world in front of us.
But the genius of the fresco is in its faces. Raphael had almost no ancient portraits to work from, so he did something audacious: he painted some of the philosophers of antiquity using the features of the artists of his own age...
Plato was given the face of Leonardo da Vinci, then an old man, whom Raphael revered. The melancholy figure seated alone in the foreground, leaning on a block of marble and lost in thought, is widely believed to be Michelangelo, who was at that very moment painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling a short walk away. Raphael cast him as Heraclitus, the philosopher known for his solitary temperament. The mathematician Euclid, bent over a compass to teach a cluster of students, was given the face of the architect Bramante, the man then designing the new St. Peter's Basilica.
And on the far right edge, in a dark cap, one young man looks directly out of the fresco and meets the eye of anyone standing in front of it. That is Raphael, placing himself among the greatest minds in history...
Raphael died in 1520 at the age of 37. He was buried in the Pantheon, an honor rarely accorded to an artist, and his epitaph, written by Pietro Bembo, reads: “Here lies Raphael, by whom Nature feared to be outdone while he lived, and when he died, feared she would die with him.”
I write a weekly newsletter for over 50,000 people who love rediscovering the beauty of the past. You can join us at the link below, and if you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible:
James-lucas.com/welcome
Thanks for reading.
English
