00:00:24.758 --> 00:00:26.192
The School of Athens,

00:00:26.192 --> 00:00:28.561
one of the most celebrated works of Renaissance art,

00:00:28.561 --> 00:00:32.799
was created by Raphael
when he was in his mid-twenties

00:00:33.333 --> 00:00:38.071
and, remarkably, was one of the very
first large scale frescoes

00:00:38.071 --> 00:00:41.441
he ever even attempted.

00:00:42.709 --> 00:00:46.913
Invited to Rome in 1508, as a relatively unknown painter,

00:00:47.113 --> 00:00:49.816
to work alongside a number of other artists,

00:00:49.816 --> 00:00:53.820
to decorate Pope Julius II’s newly created papal apartments,

00:00:54.387 --> 00:00:56.856
he quickly managed to outshine them all:

00:00:56.856 --> 00:00:59.125
single handedly winning the commission

00:00:59.125 --> 00:01:02.729
to paint all four of Julius's new rooms,

00:01:02.729 --> 00:01:04.898
firmly establishing himself

00:01:04.898 --> 00:01:08.301
as one of the two most creative forces in Rome —

00:01:08.301 --> 00:01:12.338
together with Michelangelo, eight years his senior,

00:01:12.338 --> 00:01:16.309
then hart at work on painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel

00:01:16.309 --> 00:01:17.710
just around the corner.

00:01:19.479 --> 00:01:22.415
And exactly like the Sistine Chapel ceiling,

00:01:22.415 --> 00:01:25.819
today, over 500 years later,

00:01:25.819 --> 00:01:29.989
the School of Athens stands
as one of the most iconic monuments

00:01:29.989 --> 00:01:32.926
to the magnificence
of the High Renaissance,

00:01:32.926 --> 00:01:37.597
a seemingly superhuman feat of elaborately
constructed beauty and harmony,

00:01:37.597 --> 00:01:43.069
whose rich symbolism and elegantly subtle
levels of meaning continue to captivate

00:01:43.069 --> 00:01:47.540
anyone willing to spend a few moments
uncovering and appreciating them.

00:01:49.542 --> 00:01:52.946
Which is exactly what we'll do now.

00:02:02.188 --> 00:02:06.993
We don’t know the precise details of how Raphael came
to paint his first frescoes

00:02:06.993 --> 00:02:10.530
in what would eventually become known
as the Raphael Rooms.

00:02:11.097 --> 00:02:14.667
All we're certain of is that he received
payment for his work there

00:02:14.667 --> 00:02:20.607
in January 1509, after having abruptly
abandoned a Florentine altarpiece

00:02:20.640 --> 00:02:23.176
that would remain forever unfinished,

00:02:23.176 --> 00:02:27.247
leading many to conclude
that he rushed to Rome in mid-1508

00:02:27.247 --> 00:02:29.983
as soon as he got the opportunity.

00:02:29.983 --> 00:02:33.620
And we also don't know the identities
of all the artists

00:02:33.620 --> 00:02:37.290
first officially asked by Julius
to work on his new apartments,

00:02:37.857 --> 00:02:40.426
but they certainly included Perugino,

00:02:40.426 --> 00:02:44.230
one of the most dominant painters of late
15th-century Italy,

00:02:44.230 --> 00:02:49.035
who’d been chosen by Julius's
influential uncle, Pope Sixtus IV

00:02:49.035 --> 00:02:53.072
decades earlier as a key member of the artistic dream team

00:02:53.072 --> 00:02:56.676
that frescoed the walls of his newly
created Sistine Chapel —

00:02:57.143 --> 00:03:04.017
Along with Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Cosimo Rosselli,
and Luca Signorelli.

00:03:05.185 --> 00:03:08.588
The recruitment of artists for Julius's
new apartments

00:03:08.588 --> 00:03:12.692
was probably delegated
to his chief architect, former painter,

00:03:12.692 --> 00:03:17.130
and all round papal right-hand man, Donato Bramante,

00:03:17.130 --> 00:03:20.700
who chose the Milanese painter Bartolomeo Suarti —

00:03:21.000 --> 00:03:24.604
his former student consequently nicknamed Bramantino —

00:03:25.471 --> 00:03:28.141
as well as a number of younger talents

00:03:28.141 --> 00:03:33.513
such as the Venetian Lorenzo Lotto,
and two more up-and-coming stars:

00:03:33.513 --> 00:03:37.016
the painter and architect Baldassare Peruzzi,

00:03:37.016 --> 00:03:41.588
and the artist Giovanni Bassi, known as Il Sodoma,

00:03:41.921 --> 00:03:45.325
both invited to Rome by Agostino Chigi,

00:03:45.325 --> 00:03:48.695
Julius's spectacularly wealthy banker,

00:03:48.695 --> 00:03:52.131
whose sumptuous new Roman villa
was then being built

00:03:52.131 --> 00:03:54.334
according to Peruzzi’s design,

00:03:54.334 --> 00:03:59.706
and would eventually contain a number of beautiful frescoes by Peruzzi,

00:03:59.706 --> 00:04:03.743
Sodoma, and indeed, Raphael.

00:04:04.510 --> 00:04:07.714
But that was a few years in the future.

00:04:07.714 --> 00:04:13.553
In 1508, Raphael of Urbino
was merely another ambitious young painter

00:04:13.653 --> 00:04:17.323
whose captivating Madonnas and altarpieces
had surely caught

00:04:17.323 --> 00:04:22.495
the attention of Bramante —
also from Urbino, as it happens.

00:04:22.929 --> 00:04:26.466
But for all of Bramante’s experience and influence,

00:04:26.466 --> 00:04:30.069
it would be a grave mistake
to overlook the personal impact

00:04:30.069 --> 00:04:31.971
of Julius himself.

00:04:33.406 --> 00:04:35.842
This most dynamic of popes,

00:04:35.842 --> 00:04:39.012
whose energy levels bordered on the hyperactive,

00:04:39.012 --> 00:04:42.348
from his constant plotting against the surrounding regional powers

00:04:42.348 --> 00:04:45.551
to redraw the map of Italy
in the Church's favour,

00:04:45.551 --> 00:04:49.989
to his many urban renewal projects
designed to change the face of Rome —

00:04:49.989 --> 00:04:52.692
including, most famously of all,

00:04:52.692 --> 00:04:55.662
his bold decision to tear down the Old Saint Peter’s

00:04:55.662 --> 00:04:58.665
and replace it with a new, far more glorious version —

00:04:59.432 --> 00:05:02.402
to his occasional forays
at the head of the papal army

00:05:02.402 --> 00:05:05.838
to personally subdue
rebellious rulers of the Papal States,

00:05:06.673 --> 00:05:10.076
also possessed a deep
and penetrating intellect,

00:05:10.443 --> 00:05:14.347
a characteristic often
airbrushed away by later revisionists

00:05:14.347 --> 00:05:18.251
anxious to portray him
as simply a crazed warmonger.

00:05:19.185 --> 00:05:22.588
A few months earlier,
at the beginning of 1508,

00:05:22.955 --> 00:05:26.959
it was Julius who'd insisted
that the renowned sculptor Michelangelo

00:05:26.959 --> 00:05:31.764
should temporarily stop work on the figures
for his extravagant tomb he’d ordered

00:05:31.764 --> 00:05:34.701
and fresco the Sistine Chapel ceiling instead,

00:05:35.401 --> 00:05:40.239
resolutely ignoring Michelangelo's
protestations that he was “no painter”.

00:05:41.341 --> 00:05:45.244
And it was Julius who, after a relatively short time,

00:05:45.778 --> 00:05:49.716
stepped in and summarily dismissed
all the other artists

00:05:49.716 --> 00:05:53.119
who'd been initially invited
to decorate his new apartments —

00:05:53.386 --> 00:05:57.190
awarding the entire commission
for all the rooms’ paintings

00:05:57.190 --> 00:06:01.027
to the young Raphael, a painter
whose only experience

00:06:01.027 --> 00:06:04.764
in fresco before arriving in Rome,
so far as we know,

00:06:05.131 --> 00:06:10.303
was one half-finished work
in a Perugian church that, as it happens,

00:06:10.636 --> 00:06:13.806
would only be completed
shortly after his death

00:06:13.806 --> 00:06:17.210
by none other than Perugino.

00:06:17.243 --> 00:06:20.646
But none of that bothered Julius,
nor should it have,

00:06:21.247 --> 00:06:24.984
because for all his legendary restlessness
and quick temper,

00:06:25.618 --> 00:06:30.223
he clearly had some of the most impeccable
artistic instincts in history,

00:06:30.990 --> 00:06:34.360
not only knowing who to choose
for his projects,

00:06:34.560 --> 00:06:37.296
but also, equally importantly,

00:06:37.296 --> 00:06:42.368
giving them sufficient latitude to fully indulge
their creativity and imagination.

00:06:43.469 --> 00:06:48.307
The Sistine Chapel ceiling, after all,
was originally supposed to only contain

00:06:48.307 --> 00:06:52.845
representations of the 12 apostles
placed around a central geometric pattern,

00:06:53.446 --> 00:06:56.883
before Michelangelo argued
that a much more fitting image

00:06:56.883 --> 00:06:59.952
for the vault of the most prestigious chapel in Christendom

00:06:59.952 --> 00:07:02.955
would be an intricately-detailed history of Christianity

00:07:03.322 --> 00:07:06.993
from the beginning of the world
to the ancestors of Jesus.

00:07:06.993 --> 00:07:12.765
And Julius, to his eternal credit,
and humanity's enormous benefit,

00:07:12.765 --> 00:07:16.469
simply let him loose to do his thing.

00:07:16.969 --> 00:07:22.241
Art clearly mattered to Julius in a way
that it did to no other Renaissance leader.

00:07:22.742 --> 00:07:26.512
In an age when rulers constantly
vied with each other to commission works

00:07:26.512 --> 00:07:30.483
that would best trumpet their level of
refinement and sense of personal grandeur.

00:07:31.317 --> 00:07:36.489
Julius, while also often clearly inclined
towards the personally grandiose,

00:07:37.023 --> 00:07:41.093
nonetheless intuitively understood
that art's greatest power

00:07:41.093 --> 00:07:44.897
was its unique capacity
for deeply inspirational storytelling,

00:07:45.431 --> 00:07:49.969
seamlessly combining the emotional
with the intellectual in a way that could

00:07:49.969 --> 00:07:53.606
profoundly enhance the influence
of the Church to one and all —

00:07:54.340 --> 00:07:58.478
— from the most sophisticated
humanist scholar to the humblest peasant.

00:07:59.846 --> 00:08:04.684
Indeed, by most accounts, it was Julius’
heightened sensitivity to art

00:08:04.817 --> 00:08:08.287
that led him to create his new papal
apartments in the first place,

00:08:08.955 --> 00:08:12.325
driving him, exasperated, out of those formerly

00:08:12.325 --> 00:08:15.962
occupied by his hated predecessor,
Alexander VI,

00:08:15.962 --> 00:08:18.130
one floor directly below,

00:08:18.130 --> 00:08:21.367
whose walls had been elaborately painted by Pinturicchio,

00:08:21.367 --> 00:08:23.536
some 15 years earlier,

00:08:23.536 --> 00:08:27.773
complete with repeated invocations
of the symbolic “Borgia bull”,

00:08:27.773 --> 00:08:34.347
and occasional, all-too-vivid likenesses of Alexander
and other members of his Borgia family.

00:08:35.648 --> 00:08:38.184
By moving his quarters upstairs, then,

00:08:38.184 --> 00:08:40.386
Julius would not only relieve himself

00:08:40.386 --> 00:08:44.790
of the frustration of having to look
at images of his detested former rival,

00:08:45.725 --> 00:08:48.427
he would give himself yet another opportunity

00:08:48.427 --> 00:08:53.132
to successfully fashion his own uniquely spectacular artistic legacy,

00:08:54.000 --> 00:08:59.071
an opportunity which, needless to
say, he fully capitalized on.

00:09:05.511 --> 00:09:07.413
The School of Athens is in the room

00:09:07.413 --> 00:09:11.684
that Raphael initially started
painting in when he came to Rome in 1508,

00:09:12.385 --> 00:09:15.788
and could well have been the first fresco
that he completed.

00:09:16.088 --> 00:09:17.990
The room in question is called,

00:09:17.990 --> 00:09:23.663
ever since the influential art historian Giorgio
Vasari described it in detail decades later,

00:09:23.963 --> 00:09:27.433
The Stanza della Segnatura —
a signing room

00:09:27.433 --> 00:09:32.071
where the Pope officially enacts
his formal declarations and proclamations.

00:09:32.738 --> 00:09:36.842
But most scholars believe that
it only took on that function years later

00:09:36.842 --> 00:09:42.548
when Vasari was writing about it,
and its original purpose was Julius' private library,

00:09:42.548 --> 00:09:46.085
with its beautiful mosaic floor particularly conducive

00:09:46.085 --> 00:09:49.889
to thoughtfully moving through a room
filled with compelling frescoes

00:09:50.189 --> 00:09:54.093
which revealingly contain
a large number of books within them.

00:09:55.361 --> 00:09:57.630
The actual books in the library,

00:09:57.630 --> 00:10:00.967
a small collection of some 200–300 or so,

00:10:00.967 --> 00:10:06.005
would have been placed in low-lying cabinets coming up to the level
of the surrounding paintings.

00:10:07.406 --> 00:10:11.777
It might seem surprising that the notoriously non-sedentary Julius

00:10:11.777 --> 00:10:15.181
would be so determined
to create his own personal library,

00:10:15.548 --> 00:10:19.352
but he had long come to appreciate
that libraries were one of the most

00:10:19.352 --> 00:10:24.156
effective ways to vigorously promote
the power and influence of the Church.

00:10:25.391 --> 00:10:29.762
When his uncle, Pope Sixtus IV, developed the Vatican Library

00:10:29.762 --> 00:10:34.133
as one of a number of his many ambitious
urban renewal projects,

00:10:34.133 --> 00:10:41.040
it was Julius, then Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere,
who became its principal driving force.

00:10:41.774 --> 00:10:45.177
And it seems clear that Julius new private library,

00:10:45.411 --> 00:10:49.949
mirroring that main Vatican library
two floors directly below it,

00:10:49.949 --> 00:10:54.787
was explicitly designed
to impress the many guests and dignitaries

00:10:55.087 --> 00:10:58.591
that regularly flowed
through his new apartments.

00:10:59.191 --> 00:11:05.598
But to fully understand just why, exactly,
something so seemingly benign as a library

00:11:05.598 --> 00:11:08.367
played such a preeminent role in Church propaganda,

00:11:09.101 --> 00:11:11.804
we have to plunge into the spirit of the times.

00:11:14.073 --> 00:11:17.376
Julius’ reign in the early 16th century

00:11:17.376 --> 00:11:20.546
followed an intense, centuries-long development

00:11:20.546 --> 00:11:23.949
in the movement that came to be called
Renaissance humanism:

00:11:24.450 --> 00:11:29.755
the unrelenting determination to focus
attention on the ancient Greco-Roman world

00:11:30.056 --> 00:11:34.727
and passionately reengage with its many
remarkable intellectual accomplishments

00:11:35.094 --> 00:11:38.497
that had lain dormant
after centuries of neglect.

00:11:38.964 --> 00:11:44.904
Many of the great 15th-century humanist
scholars had worked directly in the papal curia,

00:11:44.904 --> 00:11:49.842
and in two notable instances,
humanists became popes themselves.

00:11:51.210 --> 00:11:54.914
It was a particularly broad movement,
with many different offshoots,

00:11:55.681 --> 00:11:57.383
from an unflinching insistence

00:11:57.383 --> 00:12:00.786
on classical styles
for contemporary Latin compositions,

00:12:01.620 --> 00:12:06.692
to expeditions to dusty monasteries
to find long-lost literary masterpieces,

00:12:07.359 --> 00:12:11.764
to impromptu excavations, to rediscover
long-buried artistic treasure.

00:12:12.932 --> 00:12:17.703
And then, layered upon all of that,
was the philosophical movement

00:12:17.703 --> 00:12:22.641
known as Neoplatonism, that first emerged
in the mid-third century A.D.

00:12:22.975 --> 00:12:27.680
and maintained that all of reality
was derived from a single, ineffable,

00:12:27.847 --> 00:12:32.418
unifying principle, often
referred to as simply”The One”.

00:12:33.919 --> 00:12:37.156
Over the ages, Neoplatonism appeared in the writings

00:12:37.156 --> 00:12:41.127
of a wide range of Muslim,
Jewish, and Christian thinkers.

00:12:41.627 --> 00:12:44.730
As “The One” naturally became associated

00:12:44.730 --> 00:12:48.134
with their own particular interpretations of God.

00:12:48.601 --> 00:12:53.105
And by the 15th century,
Neoplatonic concepts featured strongly

00:12:53.105 --> 00:12:56.675
in the works of two prominent humanist
cardinals of the church.

00:12:57.209 --> 00:13:02.648
The German polymath Nicholas of Cusa
and the Byzantine scholar Bessarion,

00:13:02.648 --> 00:13:07.486
a former student of the renowned Greek
Neoplatonist Gemistus Plethon,

00:13:07.486 --> 00:13:10.656
whose visit to Florence in the late 1430s

00:13:10.656 --> 00:13:15.861
had a profound impact on the humanist
scholars surrounding Cosima de Medici,

00:13:15.861 --> 00:13:21.901
setting the stage for the later appearance of
the most influential Renaissance Neoplatonist of all:

00:13:21.901 --> 00:13:24.904
Cosimo’s protégé, Marsilio Ficino.

00:13:25.771 --> 00:13:29.775
Ficino was not only the world's
greatest living authority on Plato,

00:13:30.242 --> 00:13:31.710
he disagreed strongly

00:13:31.710 --> 00:13:35.581
with the contemporary trend
to separate philosophy from religion,

00:13:36.148 --> 00:13:40.419
maintaining that philosophy
should always be subordinate to theology,

00:13:40.820 --> 00:13:44.623
a view vividly expressed in his 18-volume masterpiece,

00:13:44.623 --> 00:13:48.294
Platonic Theology, On the Immortality of the Soul,

00:13:48.294 --> 00:13:50.796
which aimed to show how Plato's insights

00:13:50.796 --> 00:13:55.501
pointed the way towards a deeper understanding
of the underlying Christian truth.

00:13:56.802 --> 00:13:57.436
In fact,

00:13:57.436 --> 00:14:00.372
Ficino’s determination to enfold ancient beliefs

00:14:00.372 --> 00:14:06.512
into an avowedly Christian context hardly stopped at Plato,
as he repeatedly wove together

00:14:06.512 --> 00:14:11.283
a mesmerizing array of concepts —
from ancient Egyptian sages

00:14:11.283 --> 00:14:14.954
to astrological principles
to folk medicine —

00:14:14.954 --> 00:14:18.724
to demonstrate how all these seemingly unrelated pathways

00:14:18.724 --> 00:14:23.162
were nonetheless meaningful windows
into appreciating God's plan.

00:14:23.829 --> 00:14:28.601
And Ficino’s bold universalism was somehow extended even further

00:14:28.601 --> 00:14:33.405
by his colleague and former student,
the remarkable Pico della Mirandola,

00:14:33.906 --> 00:14:37.309
who famously sought to combine the Jewish Kabbalah,

00:14:37.309 --> 00:14:40.880
Arabic mysticism, Chaldean philosophy,

00:14:40.880 --> 00:14:42.982
and much, much more

00:14:42.982 --> 00:14:48.587
in his own wildly ambitious pursuit to unify all human knowledge.

00:14:49.321 --> 00:14:54.460
And while Pico died in 1494, and Ficino in 1499,

00:14:54.793 --> 00:14:58.964
these ideas were still very much in the air some nine years later,

00:14:58.964 --> 00:15:04.603
with several notable figures of Julius’ court
anxious to put their own unique spin

00:15:04.603 --> 00:15:09.141
on how his papacy represented
a singular moment in world history:

00:15:09.308 --> 00:15:13.345
the divinely-sanctioned occasion
to comprehensively synthesize

00:15:13.345 --> 00:15:18.217
all past wisdom traditions
within a triumphantly resplendent Church,

00:15:18.217 --> 00:15:21.153
centered in a glittering and resurgent Rome.

00:15:23.222 --> 00:15:27.993
So it was that Battista Cansali,
one of the Pope's chief orators,

00:15:28.427 --> 00:15:33.265
gave a celebrated oration in the Sistine
Chapel on New Year's Day of 1508,

00:15:33.632 --> 00:15:37.436
describing how Julius was now engineering
a Roman renewal

00:15:37.436 --> 00:15:41.573
of the long-dead spirit of the ancient
Athenian intellectual world —

00:15:42.141 --> 00:15:45.477
a message palpably resonant
with The School of Athens

00:15:45.477 --> 00:15:49.048
that Raphael would begin to paint only a few months later.

00:15:49.949 --> 00:15:55.054
And so it was, too, that the Pope's
personal librarian, Tommaso Inghirami,

00:15:55.688 --> 00:15:59.325
an erudite humanist, poet, scholar, and orator,

00:15:59.825 --> 00:16:04.697
had enthusiastically delivered
many speeches on how Julius' dynamic

00:16:04.697 --> 00:16:08.834
and muscular papacy
represented a triumphant Christian beacon

00:16:08.834 --> 00:16:10.803
that was a direct continuation

00:16:10.803 --> 00:16:14.506
of the greatest accomplishments
of the ancient Greeks and Romans.

00:16:15.507 --> 00:16:18.677
And then there was Egidio da Viterbo.

00:16:18.677 --> 00:16:22.081
Appointed head of the Augustinian order by Julius,

00:16:22.214 --> 00:16:25.818
he was perhaps the most influential papal
advisor of all.

00:16:26.552 --> 00:16:29.722
A dedicated follower of Marsilio Ficino,

00:16:29.722 --> 00:16:33.625
his stirring orations regularly singled out how the insights

00:16:33.625 --> 00:16:37.796
of both classical poets and philosophers
and the Hebrew prophets

00:16:38.130 --> 00:16:42.901
had paved the way for the coming of Christ
and his future Roman Church:

00:16:42.901 --> 00:16:44.636
The New Jerusalem.

00:16:45.170 --> 00:16:46.205
In short,

00:16:46.205 --> 00:16:50.709
there's a clear line from Ficino
and Pico’s determination to incorporate

00:16:50.709 --> 00:16:55.514
a spectrum of past wisdom traditions
in a comprehensive Christian worldview

00:16:56.248 --> 00:17:00.386
to its enthusiastic reception
by the major players of Julian Rome

00:17:00.686 --> 00:17:04.089
anxious to promote the dawn of their new
golden age,

00:17:04.723 --> 00:17:09.161
to the brilliant young painter from Urbino
who was so ingeniously able

00:17:09.161 --> 00:17:14.099
to visually represent these key ideas —
all while simultaneously constructing

00:17:14.099 --> 00:17:19.138
a beautiful bibliographical categorization
scheme for the Pope's private library.

00:17:20.439 --> 00:17:24.610
And to best appreciate how Rafael managed
to accomplish all of that,

00:17:24.943 --> 00:17:28.347
the place to start is the room ceiling.

00:17:29.014 --> 00:17:32.017
Below the central apex of a group of playful angels

00:17:32.017 --> 00:17:35.020
holding up Julius's papal coat of arms,

00:17:35.287 --> 00:17:38.390
we find four separate allegorical female figures,

00:17:38.390 --> 00:17:41.627
each one sitting on a different coloured cloud bank,

00:17:41.627 --> 00:17:45.631
representing the four disciplines
invoked by many libraries of the time:

00:17:46.298 --> 00:17:49.468
theology, poetry,

00:17:49.468 --> 00:17:52.304
jurisprudence, and philosophy.

00:17:53.505 --> 00:17:57.109
Meanwhile, an explicit demonstration
of the natural overlap

00:17:57.109 --> 00:18:02.047
in these disciplinary boundaries occurs
through the four rectangular paintings

00:18:02.047 --> 00:18:04.817
adjacent to the allegorical tondos.

00:18:04.817 --> 00:18:07.486
Between jurisprudence and theology

00:18:07.486 --> 00:18:13.525
we have Adam and Eve,
punished for transgressing God's law in the Garden of Eden.

00:18:13.525 --> 00:18:16.228
Between jurisprudence and philosophy

00:18:16.228 --> 00:18:19.198
we see the famous scene of the Judgement of Solomon,

00:18:19.198 --> 00:18:24.169
where the true mother is stunningly revealed through her selfless action.

00:18:24.169 --> 00:18:27.706
Between poetry and theology lies a scene

00:18:27.706 --> 00:18:31.543
from the musical competition
between Apollo and Marsyas,

00:18:31.543 --> 00:18:36.248
who hubristically challenged a god, and paid for it with his life.

00:18:36.515 --> 00:18:40.752
While between philosophy and poetry,
there's an image of Urania,

00:18:40.953 --> 00:18:45.390
the muse of astronomy, illustrating
how the music of the heavenly spheres

00:18:45.557 --> 00:18:48.961
can be revealed through dedicated scholarly effort.

00:18:50.162 --> 00:18:53.899
And then, directly underneath each allegorical figure,

00:18:54.299 --> 00:18:57.870
are large-scale representations
of the subject in question.

00:18:58.570 --> 00:19:02.107
Below the figure of poetry,
we have the Parnassus,

00:19:02.641 --> 00:19:07.546
where Apollo is flanked by the nine muses
and surrounded on both sides

00:19:07.546 --> 00:19:11.216
by a diverse collection
of some of the greatest poets in history,

00:19:11.450 --> 00:19:15.921
along with several contemporary literary
stars from the early 16th century.

00:19:16.655 --> 00:19:22.294
And, it appears, a surprising cameo
of Raphael himself for good measure.

00:19:23.662 --> 00:19:28.467
Underneath the allegorical figure of Justice,
with her famous scales and sword,

00:19:28.467 --> 00:19:31.036
we have a combination of three scenes:

00:19:31.470 --> 00:19:34.573
a lunette, showing the three cardinal virtues

00:19:34.573 --> 00:19:38.410
of Temperance, Prudence and Fortitude, that are required

00:19:38.410 --> 00:19:41.813
to appropriately implement the fourth cardinal virtue:

00:19:41.813 --> 00:19:43.682
Justice itself.

00:19:43.682 --> 00:19:45.284
While below those three,

00:19:45.284 --> 00:19:49.555
we find depictions of two pivotal moments
in the history of jurisprudence;

00:19:50.022 --> 00:19:54.793
One secular—the sixth century
Byzantine Emperor Justinian I

00:19:54.793 --> 00:19:57.896
the first receiving the civil law code
known as the Pandects—

00:19:58.897 --> 00:20:03.035
and one spiritual—the 13th century Pope Gregory IX

00:20:03.035 --> 00:20:06.939
formally approving the canon
law code known as The Decretals.

00:20:08.407 --> 00:20:10.542
Under the Figure of Theology,

00:20:10.542 --> 00:20:12.110
we have a fresco that,

00:20:12.110 --> 00:20:15.881
Ever since Vasari, has been commonly referred to as

00:20:15.881 --> 00:20:18.917
The Disputation of the Holy Sacrament or Disputa.

00:20:19.551 --> 00:20:23.055
But despite the frantic gesturing
of a couple of its characters,

00:20:23.589 --> 00:20:27.426
it's really much more about
our human interaction with the divine

00:20:27.459 --> 00:20:32.364
through the miracle of Communion
than any disputation or argument per se,

00:20:32.931 --> 00:20:37.269
with its separate levels of human activity
and its heavenly counterpart

00:20:37.269 --> 00:20:42.174
that conspicuously features a combination of characters
from both the New and Old Testaments,

00:20:42.975 --> 00:20:46.979
and the explicitly Neoplatonic device
of four steadily

00:20:46.979 --> 00:20:51.850
diminishing golden spheres linking God
the Father, Christ the Son,

00:20:52.251 --> 00:20:56.622
the dove of the Holy Spirit,
and lastly, the consecrated host—

00:20:57.222 --> 00:21:00.626
our way of engaging with the unseeable
Christ,

00:21:00.826 --> 00:21:04.563
its vital importance further emphasized by its position

00:21:04.563 --> 00:21:06.632
as the vanishing point of the painting.

00:21:07.966 --> 00:21:11.403
Finally, under the allegorical figure of philosophy,

00:21:11.670 --> 00:21:15.607
we find the School of Athens
on the eastern wall of the Stanza,

00:21:15.907 --> 00:21:19.244
directly opposite the Disputa.

00:21:19.244 --> 00:21:22.614
But before we turn to examine it in
greater detail,

00:21:22.814 --> 00:21:26.351
it's worth making a few observations
about the room as a whole,

00:21:26.718 --> 00:21:29.955
and how its many remarkable artistic
constituents

00:21:29.955 --> 00:21:33.325
were explicitly designed to fit so well
together.

00:21:34.426 --> 00:21:35.594
Because the central point

00:21:35.594 --> 00:21:39.164
to bear in mind throughout any discussion
of the School of Athens

00:21:39.831 --> 00:21:43.335
is that it was not created
as a single independent work,

00:21:43.935 --> 00:21:47.406
but rather as an integral part
of the comprehensive whole

00:21:47.406 --> 00:21:50.208
that is the Stanza della Segnatura.

00:21:50.208 --> 00:21:53.078
Which not only explains
why a work showcasing

00:21:53.078 --> 00:21:57.049
philosophy illustrates
a diverse array of ancient insights,

00:21:57.749 --> 00:22:00.752
but also why it contains
explicit references

00:22:00.752 --> 00:22:04.289
to the other three disciplines
highlighted in this remarkable room:

00:22:04.723 --> 00:22:09.961
Poetry, Jurisprudence, and, above all, Theology

00:22:11.330 --> 00:22:12.798
More generally still,

00:22:12.798 --> 00:22:15.667
we've seen how these four core subject areas

00:22:15.667 --> 00:22:19.071
are consistently reinforced throughout the Stanza,

00:22:19.538 --> 00:22:21.873
from the four ceiling tondos

00:22:21.873 --> 00:22:24.876
to the four larger wall frescoes,
to the four central spirals on the mosaic

00:22:24.876 --> 00:22:27.646
to the four larger wall frescoes,

00:22:27.646 --> 00:22:32.184
to the four central spirals on the mosaic floor,
equidistant from Julius's centrally placed coat of arms.

00:22:32.184 --> 00:22:35.387
And we might well be tempted to conclude,

00:22:35.387 --> 00:22:38.590
in keeping with our modern classification systems,

00:22:38.590 --> 00:22:42.194
that the pope's personal library of the Stanza della Segnatura

00:22:42.627 --> 00:22:47.332
represented four distinct, independent areas of human inquiry.

00:22:47.999 --> 00:22:51.336
But that's not quite the right way to look at things,

00:22:51.336 --> 00:22:55.807
not only because there's a natural overlap between all four subjects,

00:22:55.807 --> 00:23:01.413
as shown in the rectangular ceiling
frescoes, but even more significantly,

00:23:01.413 --> 00:23:05.751
because those four disciplines were hardly on equal footing,

00:23:05.751 --> 00:23:10.956
with Theology clearly, the most important and dominant of the four.

00:23:10.956 --> 00:23:16.395
Which, among other things, helps
to explain why The Disputa contains by far

00:23:16.395 --> 00:23:20.866
the greatest amount of gold
that would have twinkled spectacularly in the candlelight

00:23:20.866 --> 00:23:25.270
and was placed prominently as the first painting
Julius would have seen in the room

00:23:25.504 --> 00:23:29.174
upon entering it from his private
quarters a few doors down.

00:23:30.308 --> 00:23:37.249
In other words, the very concepts of philosophy,
poetry, jurisprudence and theology

00:23:37.249 --> 00:23:41.820
were considerably different and more fluid
at the turn of the 16th century

00:23:41.820 --> 00:23:45.957
than they are today,
with the label of “theologian” frequently

00:23:45.957 --> 00:23:50.328
applied to pre-Christian philosophers
like Aristotle and Plato,

00:23:50.328 --> 00:23:53.899
as well as metaphysical Christian poets
like Dante.

00:23:54.166 --> 00:23:57.536
Which is why he's not just depicted
in the Parnassus,

00:23:57.536 --> 00:24:04.910
but also in the Disputa, standing right
next to Julius's influential uncle Sixtus IV,

00:24:04.910 --> 00:24:07.446
who’d written a famous book about the Eucharist

00:24:07.446 --> 00:24:11.516
which lies at his feet
as he gazes intently at the host,

00:24:11.516 --> 00:24:15.454
the conceptual and perspectival focal
point of the painting.

00:24:16.521 --> 00:24:19.925
Other repeated figures
reflecting the room's thematic overlap

00:24:20.292 --> 00:24:24.596
include Julius as both Gregory
the Great in the Disputa

00:24:25.096 --> 00:24:28.166
and as Gregory IX receiving the Decretals.

00:24:28.166 --> 00:24:31.603
now wearing the famous beard he grew in 1511,

00:24:32.737 --> 00:24:35.674
and his chief architect Donato Bramante,

00:24:35.674 --> 00:24:42.147
who makes an appearance in both the Disputa
and, as Euclid, in the School of Athens.

00:24:43.215 --> 00:24:46.151
In fact,
the School of Athens and the Disputa,

00:24:46.151 --> 00:24:49.488
the two largest frescoes on opposite sides of the room,

00:24:49.488 --> 00:24:55.494
contain several pairs of similar figures,
perhaps as a sign of the special relationship

00:24:55.494 --> 00:24:59.764
that many believe existed
between philosophy and theology.

00:25:00.932 --> 00:25:05.637
Meanwhile, the physical interconnectedness
of the room and its surroundings

00:25:05.637 --> 00:25:10.709
is referenced several times from Gregory IX in the jurisprudence fresco

00:25:10.709 --> 00:25:16.481
located adjacent to the Disputa;
and Justinian I on the side of the School of Athens

00:25:16.481 --> 00:25:21.620
as a direct reflection of their respective
theological and secular orientations;

00:25:21.620 --> 00:25:26.825
to the deliberate placing of the Parnassus
over the room's sole exterior window

00:25:26.825 --> 00:25:29.594
that looks out on both Julius's beloved Belvedere Palazzo,

00:25:29.594 --> 00:25:33.465
home to both the Apollo Belvedere

00:25:33.465 --> 00:25:37.536
and the recently unearthed statue of Laocoön and his sons,

00:25:37.536 --> 00:25:41.106
whose face is seamlessly grafted onto that of Homer;

00:25:41.106 --> 00:25:49.814
and Vatican Hill, the mound that Egidio da Viterbo had often referred
to in his sermons as the new Mount Zion.

00:25:50.982 --> 00:25:54.419
There are even implicit references in the room’s paintings

00:25:54.419 --> 00:25:56.955
to the books that lay on the surrounding shelves,

00:25:57.389 --> 00:26:01.893
such as Julius' personal copy of Gregory the Great's Morality in Job,

00:26:02.327 --> 00:26:05.330
which was richly ornamented with an intricate pattern

00:26:05.330 --> 00:26:11.970
that eventually found its way to the Disputa’s pivotal altar table
that‘s emblazoned twice with Julius’ name,

00:26:11.970 --> 00:26:15.640
as well as part of the ceiling decoration.

00:26:15.974 --> 00:26:19.010
The Stanza della Segnatura,
in other words,

00:26:19.010 --> 00:26:24.983
must first and foremost be seen as a breathtakingly
integrated masterpiece in its own right—

00:26:25.550 --> 00:26:28.920
quite simply, the most magnificent and stunningly

00:26:28.920 --> 00:26:32.324
coherent room in the history of art.

00:26:32.324 --> 00:26:37.562
But that hardly means that
we shouldn't carefully examine its individual components—

00:26:37.562 --> 00:26:43.234
in particular, by far its most famous fresco over 500 years later:

00:26:43.234 --> 00:26:44.836
The School of Athens.

00:26:52.277 --> 00:26:54.446
How can one painting represent

00:26:54.446 --> 00:26:58.750
the collective act of philosophizing
through the ages?

00:26:58.750 --> 00:27:02.554
If this question seems fairly
straightforward for us to answer now,

00:27:02.554 --> 00:27:05.724
it's only because of the enormous influence,

00:27:05.724 --> 00:27:09.127
conscious or otherwise, of the School of Athens.

00:27:10.695 --> 00:27:14.265
Before Raphael set to work on his masterpiece, however,n

00:27:14.265 --> 00:27:17.535
it was far from obvious how to go about doing this.

00:27:18.803 --> 00:27:22.207
There are some intriguing precedents
from the classical world,

00:27:22.607 --> 00:27:27.178
such as a now-lost Hellenistic
painting of the ancient Greek Seven Sages

00:27:27.178 --> 00:27:32.150
that was likely preserved in at least two different
Roman mosaics made centuries later.

00:27:32.851 --> 00:27:35.687
But those were only discovered
in the 19th century,

00:27:35.687 --> 00:27:38.857
and so were obviously not seen by Raphael.

00:27:38.857 --> 00:27:43.695
But what he was very much aware of
was the Renaissance fashion of depicting

00:27:43.695 --> 00:27:48.500
famous men of history,
as well as two long-standing visual devices:

00:27:48.500 --> 00:27:52.337
female personifications of the seven liberal arts

00:27:52.337 --> 00:28:00.078
of grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic,
geometry, music and astronomy,

00:28:00.979 --> 00:28:04.783
and representations of the allegorical figure of philosophy

00:28:04.783 --> 00:28:10.555
from illustrated manuscripts of the hugely influential book,
On the Consolation of Philosophy,

00:28:10.555 --> 00:28:14.292
by the early sixth century scholar Boethius,

00:28:14.292 --> 00:28:18.863
who describes his enlightening encounter with “Lady Philosophy”

00:28:18.863 --> 00:28:22.701
who appears to him when he's in prison awaiting execution.

00:28:23.835 --> 00:28:24.869
Over time,

00:28:24.869 --> 00:28:27.806
these two artistic traditions gradually merged,

00:28:27.806 --> 00:28:33.044
with the figure of philosophy often presented together
with those of the seven liberal arts

00:28:33.578 --> 00:28:39.350
and sometimes with representatives of famous philosophers
thrown in for good measure.

00:28:39.350 --> 00:28:43.254
Strongly bolstered by the dominant
humanist movement of the day,

00:28:43.588 --> 00:28:48.393
such allegorical depictions continued
to be invoked throughout the 15th century,

00:28:48.727 --> 00:28:52.464
with their popularity extending
to the highest levels of the Church,

00:28:52.764 --> 00:28:55.867
as witnessed by Antonio Pollaiuolo’s bronze sculptures

00:28:55.867 --> 00:29:00.438
of all seven liberal arts on the tomb of Pope Sixtus IV,

00:29:00.438 --> 00:29:05.810
together with the additional figures of
philosophy, theology and perspective.

00:29:06.845 --> 00:29:10.281
Meanwhile in Justus of Ghent’s liberal arts series

00:29:10.281 --> 00:29:13.685
for Federico de Montefeltro’s Gubbio studiolo,

00:29:13.752 --> 00:29:19.190
we see an intriguing new development:
with the beautiful, enthroned allegorical figure

00:29:19.190 --> 00:29:21.760
now being accompanied by a contemporary

00:29:21.760 --> 00:29:25.430
representative of the art in question
from Federico s inner circle.

00:29:26.331 --> 00:29:27.132
These were followed

00:29:27.132 --> 00:29:31.669
by two of the most directly relevant
precedents of all for the School of Athens:

00:29:32.403 --> 00:29:37.041
the 7 lunettes of the Room of the Liberal Arts in the Borgia apartments,

00:29:37.041 --> 00:29:40.111
one floor below the Stanza della Segnatura,

00:29:40.111 --> 00:29:42.147
where Pinturicchio and his workshop

00:29:42.147 --> 00:29:46.384
painted enthroned representations
of each of the seven liberal arts,

00:29:46.384 --> 00:29:50.688
surrounded by groups of their most notable
practitioners of the past and present;

00:29:51.523 --> 00:29:55.560
and Perugino’s frescoes in Perugia’s Collegio del Cambio,

00:29:55.927 --> 00:29:59.330
that some believe the teenage Raphael assisted him with,

00:29:59.664 --> 00:30:05.637
featuring split-level portrayals of the allegorical representations
of the four cardinal virtues

00:30:05.637 --> 00:30:09.941
above celebrated heroes of history who best emboided them.

00:30:09.941 --> 00:30:12.477
In the Stanza della Segnatura,

00:30:12.477 --> 00:30:15.914
we've seen that Raphael
followed this artistic tradition

00:30:15.914 --> 00:30:20.785
by also portraying a beautiful
allegorical figure of philosophy,

00:30:20.785 --> 00:30:23.621
but he then innovatively breaks with it

00:30:23.621 --> 00:30:29.327
by not placing her in the elaborate scene
that represents the act of philosophizing,

00:30:29.928 --> 00:30:32.363
but rather in the ceiling above it,

00:30:32.363 --> 00:30:37.302
where she takes her rightful place
alongside the other three corresponding figures

00:30:37.302 --> 00:30:40.405
representing theology, poetry and justice,

00:30:40.738 --> 00:30:43.808
together with instances of their direct overlap,

00:30:43.808 --> 00:30:51.382
while the principal fresco of philosophy itself
is given over to visual depictions of actual philosophers

00:30:51.382 --> 00:30:54.752
sometimes vigorously interacting with others

00:30:54.752 --> 00:30:58.556
and sometimes completely
immersed in their own world.

00:31:01.159 --> 00:31:06.698
But although the allegorical figure of philosophy is physically removed
from the School of Athens,

00:31:06.698 --> 00:31:11.069
she is still intriguingly, consistently present,

00:31:11.069 --> 00:31:15.940
repeatedly serving as an active reference
point to the main painting below

00:31:15.940 --> 00:31:18.743
in ways that we'll shortly see.

00:31:21.512 --> 00:31:24.349
And as soon as we turn to that main painting,

00:31:24.349 --> 00:31:29.954
the first thing that strikes us is the overpowering presence of the architecture depictd within it.

00:31:30.955 --> 00:31:33.791
It is, of course, a very large work,

00:31:33.791 --> 00:31:37.195
five meters high and almost eight meters wide,

00:31:37.195 --> 00:31:41.566
with a remarkably large number of
individual figures displayed throughout.

00:31:42.767 --> 00:31:46.404
And though the disputa on the opposite
wall is just as big

00:31:46.704 --> 00:31:51.976
and contains even more figures—62
to the School of Athens’ 58—

00:31:51.976 --> 00:31:56.381
those in the Disputa are found
in concentric levels throughout the work,

00:31:56.948 --> 00:31:59.651
while all 58 in the School of Athens

00:31:59.651 --> 00:32:02.987
are squeezed into the lower 2/5 of the fresco,

00:32:02.987 --> 00:32:07.959
dominated by the intricately elaborated physical space that they occupy.

00:32:09.160 --> 00:32:13.398
There are several notable artistic precedents for this scenario, too—

00:32:13.598 --> 00:32:18.736
like Ghiberti gilded bronze relief
of the meeting of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba

00:32:18.736 --> 00:32:23.007
on the lower right of his famous doors
of Florence's San Giovanni Baptistry,

00:32:23.341 --> 00:32:27.078
the so-called Gates of Paradise,
that Raphael surely would have

00:32:27.078 --> 00:32:30.882
carefully studied during his time
in Florence before coming to Rome,

00:32:31.582 --> 00:32:35.486
in which numerous figures
are positioned around the central duo

00:32:35.486 --> 00:32:39.958
who encounter each other directly
in front of the imposing arched structure

00:32:39.958 --> 00:32:42.694
that represents Solomon's Temple.

00:32:42.694 --> 00:32:45.463
And then there's Filippino Lippi's fresco

00:32:45.463 --> 00:32:48.633
of The Triumph of Saint Thomas Aquinas over the Heretics

00:32:48.633 --> 00:32:54.672
in the nearby Roman church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva,
which Raphael also would have seen,

00:32:54.672 --> 00:32:58.576
where Saint Thomas, flanked by allegorical representations of

00:32:58.576 --> 00:33:02.780
philosophy, astronomy, theology, and grammar,

00:33:02.780 --> 00:33:08.019
is centrally placed under an elaborate
indoor-outdoor architectural stage

00:33:08.019 --> 00:33:12.757
overlooking a diverse array of heretics
whom he has emphatically refuted.

00:33:13.958 --> 00:33:17.061
But while harnessing the power
of architecture to both balance

00:33:17.061 --> 00:33:22.233
and reinforce a complex many-figured scene
was hardly unprecedented,

00:33:22.233 --> 00:33:28.740
once more, Raphael boldly took things to another level entirely
in the School of Athens.

00:33:30.041 --> 00:33:32.710
We’ll return later to a detailed examination

00:33:32.710 --> 00:33:36.547
of Raphael's unique use of architecture
and space in this fresco,

00:33:37.015 --> 00:33:38.282
nut for the moment,

00:33:38.282 --> 00:33:42.020
let's turn to the specific
philosophical figures contained within it

00:33:42.020 --> 00:33:47.392
and their vivid illustration
of both past and present philosophical traditions

00:33:51.529 --> 00:33:54.032
We start off, naturally enough,

00:33:54.032 --> 00:33:57.535
with the central duo of Plato and Aristotle

00:33:57.535 --> 00:34:03.307
jointly placed in the most prominent position, directly
under the cascading series of arches,

00:34:03.307 --> 00:34:09.947
and the only ones to be conspicuously silhouetted
against the blue background of the sky behind.

00:34:09.947 --> 00:34:14.952
But while they're clearly preeminent,
they're also, equally clearly,

00:34:14.952 --> 00:34:19.791
hardly the only important representatives
of philosophical activity.

00:34:19.791 --> 00:34:23.161
Unlike the past precedents we've encountered,

00:34:23.161 --> 00:34:27.031
the scene depicted here
is neither that of principal figures

00:34:27.031 --> 00:34:31.069
flanked by a supporting cast of watchful
minor characters,

00:34:31.069 --> 00:34:34.972
or stubbornly wayward thinkers
whose intellectual transgressions

00:34:34.972 --> 00:34:38.643
are straightened out
by a divinely inspired hero,

00:34:38.643 --> 00:34:44.015
but rather a dynamic array of participants
whose interests, convictions,

00:34:44.015 --> 00:34:45.950
and modes of interaction

00:34:45.950 --> 00:34:51.322
tangibly demonstrate the inherent diversity
of the philosophical enterprise itself.

00:34:52.457 --> 00:34:56.694
And in the early 16th century,
that philosophical enterprise

00:34:56.694 --> 00:35:03.434
was understood to be a wide-ranging, rigorous investigation
of both the human and natural domains,

00:35:03.434 --> 00:35:06.704
what today we would call the arts and the sciences,

00:35:06.704 --> 00:35:10.908
in an attempt to comprehensively
make sense of the world around us,

00:35:11.309 --> 00:35:16.147
as straightforwardly invoked
by the Latin phrase Causarum Cognitio,

00:35:16.147 --> 00:35:19.083
the knowledge of causes.

00:35:19.083 --> 00:35:23.988
Philosophy, in other words,
more than any other topic in the Stanza,

00:35:23.988 --> 00:35:26.657
represented an explicit concatenation

00:35:26.657 --> 00:35:30.928
of a vast number of those ancient
pre-Christian wisdom traditions

00:35:30.928 --> 00:35:34.398
Julius's humanist court was so intensely
focused on—

00:35:34.398 --> 00:35:40.037
which explains why her allegorical figure
sits on a throne, flanked by two images

00:35:40.037 --> 00:35:44.275
of the celebrated Eastern fertility
goddess Diana of Ephesus,

00:35:44.775 --> 00:35:51.115
and wears a four-coloured robe representing
the famous ancient Greek division of all substances

00:35:51.115 --> 00:35:56.454
into the four separate elements of Earth, Air, Fire and Water—

00:35:56.454 --> 00:35:59.724
another theme that ripples throughout the entire room,

00:35:59.724 --> 00:36:04.562
most notably in the four pairs of ceiling images created by Il Sodoma

00:36:04.562 --> 00:36:10.801
in the early days of the project
that Raphael later incorporated into his final design—

00:36:10.801 --> 00:36:16.174
and possibly reinforced by the four-part
spiral mosaic of the marble floor below

00:36:16.174 --> 00:36:20.611
that also featured several stars of David,
that might well refer to the

00:36:20.611 --> 00:36:25.550
then-fashionable trend of incorporating ancient
Jewish Kabbalistic ideas

00:36:25.550 --> 00:36:27.285
into a Christian context.

00:36:28.119 --> 00:36:32.290
But for all the diverse array of knowledge traditions to consider,

00:36:32.290 --> 00:36:37.895
the two kings of philosophy in the early 16th-century
Church were unquestionably

00:36:37.895 --> 00:36:42.366
Aristotle, whose writings form
the principal intellectual backdrop

00:36:42.366 --> 00:36:46.437
of the medieval Christian methodology
known as scholasticism,

00:36:46.437 --> 00:36:48.706
and his former teacher Plato,

00:36:48.706 --> 00:36:55.046
whose reputation, after centuries of neglect,
was rapidly on the rise in the Latin West,

00:36:55.046 --> 00:36:59.750
largely due to the growing influence
of the likes of Marsilio Ficino.

00:37:01.452 --> 00:37:04.488
And while in the time-honoured academic tradition,

00:37:04.488 --> 00:37:10.595
advocates of Aristotle and Plato
would sometimes place themselves in bitterly hostile camps,

00:37:10.595 --> 00:37:13.231
the humanists in Julius's papal court

00:37:13.231 --> 00:37:16.467
took a much more deliberately balanced approach,

00:37:16.467 --> 00:37:19.637
which helps explain why both figures are placed together

00:37:19.637 --> 00:37:25.576
in a preeminent position in the centre of the painting,
with the vanishing points located between the two.

00:37:27.178 --> 00:37:29.880
Plato holds his Timaeus in one hand,

00:37:29.880 --> 00:37:32.116
his most metaphysical of dialogues,

00:37:32.116 --> 00:37:37.622
that describes how a divine craftsman has brought an ensouled world
into existence out of chaos,

00:37:37.622 --> 00:37:41.926
and points, appropriately, upwards towards the heavens.

00:37:43.127 --> 00:37:45.630
While Aristotle carries his Ethics,

00:37:45.630 --> 00:37:49.800
and gestures towards the earthly, more human, realm.

00:37:49.800 --> 00:37:52.970
Meanwhile, in the ceiling directly above them,

00:37:52.970 --> 00:37:57.942
the allegorical figure of philosophy holds her two books
in a complementary orientation

00:37:57.942 --> 00:38:02.747
to the two key figures below: one vertical and the other horizontal.

00:38:03.281 --> 00:38:07.818
While the two rectangular frescoes
adjacent to her are spatially aligned

00:38:07.818 --> 00:38:11.022
with the intellectual orientation
of each philosopher:

00:38:11.022 --> 00:38:15.626
with Urania, the heavenly muse of astronomy,
placed on the side of Plato,

00:38:16.193 --> 00:38:20.298
and the more down-to-earth
Judgment of Solomon over Aristotle.

00:38:21.599 --> 00:38:25.803
This rigorously constructed sense
of balance between Plato and Aristotle

00:38:26.237 --> 00:38:29.540
is further reinforced
by the symmetrical rows of acolytes

00:38:29.540 --> 00:38:34.412
who line their path as they move,
absorbed in discussion, through the space.

00:38:35.646 --> 00:38:37.214
To the left of Plato,

00:38:37.214 --> 00:38:41.719
Wearing a simple green cloak,
the famously snub-nosed Socrates

00:38:41.719 --> 00:38:45.656
vigorously holds forth,
gesturing with his hands to perhaps

00:38:45.656 --> 00:38:49.060
enumerate points
he is accepting or refuting.

00:38:49.827 --> 00:38:52.663
He’s certainly got the attention
of three people,

00:38:52.663 --> 00:38:55.666
while another has clearly drifted off,

00:38:55.666 --> 00:38:58.369
but who are they exactly?

00:38:58.369 --> 00:39:01.772
Well, despite centuries of impassioned debate,

00:39:01.772 --> 00:39:07.778
the short answer is that, like the vast majority of the figures
depicted in The School of Athens,

00:39:07.778 --> 00:39:09.413
nobody knows for certain.

00:39:10.214 --> 00:39:14.919
Throughout the painting, Raphael has opted
for a captivating combination

00:39:14.919 --> 00:39:18.956
of straightforward identification
and deliberate ambiguity,

00:39:19.423 --> 00:39:26.130
fully in keeping with the influential Renaissance polymath
Leon Battista Alberti’s famous  dictum to painters

00:39:26.130 --> 00:39:32.136
to construct their images in a way that's most likely to stimulate
the viewer's imagination:

00:39:32.136 --> 00:39:38.376
“Leave more for the mind to discover”, he wrote,
“than is actually apparent to the eye”.

00:39:39.043 --> 00:39:42.213
One thing that is clearly identifiable, however,

00:39:42.213 --> 00:39:45.816
is the explicitly Pythagorean nature of the diagram

00:39:45.816 --> 00:39:47.952
that's displayed in the left foreground.

00:39:51.055 --> 00:39:55.960
The Pythagoreans, who fervently believed
in the metaphysical power of numbers

00:39:55.960 --> 00:39:59.764
to demonstrate a divinely-constructed
order of the universe,

00:39:59.764 --> 00:40:05.269
famously discovered a link between mathematics and music
through the ratio of different lengths

00:40:05.269 --> 00:40:09.707
of a plucked string and the corresponding
harmonious intervals that are produced.

00:40:10.574 --> 00:40:13.377
Two strings in the ratio 2 to 1

00:40:13.377 --> 00:40:17.214
are separated in tone
by an octave or a “diapason”.

00:40:18.349 --> 00:40:20.985
Those of the ratio of 4 to 3

00:40:20.985 --> 00:40:24.889
are separated by a perfect fourth
or “diatesseron”,

00:40:26.023 --> 00:40:28.526
while those in the ratio 3 to 2

00:40:28.526 --> 00:40:33.864
are separated by a perfect fifth, or “diapente”.

00:40:33.864 --> 00:40:38.769
From there, the Pythagoreans went on
to create their fundamental tonal unit:

00:40:38.769 --> 00:40:43.374
the interval between a perfect fifth
and a perfect fourth fifth,

00:40:43.374 --> 00:40:44.842
that they called an “epogdowon”—

00:40:46.043 --> 00:40:48.813
from which they constructed their scale,

00:40:48.813 --> 00:40:52.183
together with a slightly smaller semitone.

00:40:52.183 --> 00:40:58.756
And revealingly, the full mathematics of this musical scale
was detailed in Plato's Timaeus,

00:40:58.756 --> 00:41:02.326
when he describes
the creation of the world soul.

00:41:03.294 --> 00:41:07.298
By choosing the numbers
six, eight, nine, and 12.

00:41:07.298 --> 00:41:09.800
in his summarizing tonal diagram,

00:41:09.800 --> 00:41:13.270
where “epogdowon” is slightly misspelled, as it happens,

00:41:13.270 --> 00:41:16.941
Raphael cleverly enabled all of these ideas

00:41:16.941 --> 00:41:20.811
to be simultaneously on view,

00:41:21.245 --> 00:41:25.349
before adding, in an uncharacteristic effort
to remove any conceivable ambiguity,

00:41:25.816 --> 00:41:32.389
the number ten below it:
what the Pythagoreans called “the sacred tetractys”

00:41:32.389 --> 00:41:37.061
and believed to be inherently triangular,
as is also shown here.

00:41:38.395 --> 00:41:42.366
Given all of this, the seated figure glancing at the diagram

00:41:42.366 --> 00:41:47.004
while writing in a book, came
to be identified with Pythagoras himself.

00:41:47.771 --> 00:41:50.741
While those around him have, over time,

00:41:50.741 --> 00:41:56.013
been given a broad number of different,
considerably more divergent, identities.

00:41:56.680 --> 00:41:58.215
The turbaned Arab scholar

00:41:58.215 --> 00:42:03.120
is most often associated with the 12th-century polymath Averröes,

00:42:03.120 --> 00:42:06.657
and sometimes the 9th-century philosopher Al-Kindi.

00:42:07.091 --> 00:42:10.027
But whoever he is, his inclusion is a clear

00:42:10.027 --> 00:42:15.499
reinforcement of the universalist spirit
of the Julian papal court we mentioned earlier,

00:42:15.499 --> 00:42:19.537
where divergent wisdom traditions were viewed as different,

00:42:19.537 --> 00:42:23.574
divinely-ordained pathways to the one true Christian faith,

00:42:23.574 --> 00:42:27.811
rather than simply misguided heretics
to be intellectually obliterated

00:42:27.811 --> 00:42:30.014
by canonical church authorities—

00:42:30.014 --> 00:42:33.417
the dominant artistic theme in the past.

00:42:34.251 --> 00:42:37.855
Further to the right,
the charismatic, yellow-robed fellow,

00:42:37.855 --> 00:42:40.391
looking intently over his right shoulder,

00:42:40.391 --> 00:42:45.229
is generally credited with being either
Parmenides or Anaxagoras.

00:42:45.596 --> 00:42:49.600
While the self-absorbed thinker sitting
beside him, writing down his thoughts near

00:42:49.600 --> 00:42:51.802
a perilously-placed inkwell,

00:42:51.802 --> 00:42:58.275
is nowadays widely believed to represent the truculent
pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus.

00:43:00.010 --> 00:43:04.348
Meanwhile, splayed out on the steps
in front of Plato and Aristotle,

00:43:04.348 --> 00:43:06.917
is clearly the cynic Diogenes,

00:43:06.917 --> 00:43:11.021
the fiercely independent and wilfully-destitute philosopher

00:43:11.021 --> 00:43:14.658
whose only possession,
famously, was a begging bowl—

00:43:15.392 --> 00:43:20.130
the man who coolly informed Alexander
the Great, when asked what he needed,

00:43:20.130 --> 00:43:24.535
that all he desired was for the conquering
king to move out of the way

00:43:24.535 --> 00:43:27.137
and stop blocking his sunlight.

00:43:27.137 --> 00:43:32.009
To the right of Diogenes,
we find a balding figure bent over

00:43:32.009 --> 00:43:37.081
and fully immeresed in demonstrating a geometric concept
to a group of four young students.

00:43:37.615 --> 00:43:41.018
These days, he's generally viewed as being Euclid,

00:43:41.018 --> 00:43:44.722
but over the centuries he was often thought to be Archimedes.

00:43:45.923 --> 00:43:50.628
And behind him we find a duo of sphere-holding philosophers,

00:43:50.628 --> 00:43:54.164
commonly believed to represent the geographer Ptolemy

00:43:54.164 --> 00:43:58.135
and the Persian philosopher
Zarathustra, often called Zoroaster.

00:43:59.003 --> 00:44:03.874
While directly above them stands
the ancient Athenian lawgiver Solon,

00:44:03.874 --> 00:44:08.846
or the Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus,
or the astronomer and mathematician

00:44:08.879 --> 00:44:12.182
Aristarchus of Samos or Zeno the Stoic,

00:44:12.182 --> 00:44:17.154
or maybe Carneades, the head of the Sceptical Academy,
or someone else entirely.

00:44:18.355 --> 00:44:23.560
But one figure whose identity is not in doubt is Raphael himself,

00:44:23.560 --> 00:44:27.297
cheekily inserted at the very edge of the right foreground,

00:44:27.297 --> 00:44:31.935
standing next to another figure who many,
but by no means all,

00:44:31.935 --> 00:44:34.004
assume to be Il Sodoma—

00:44:34.004 --> 00:44:36.907
his fellow Stanza della Segnatura collaborator

00:44:36.907 --> 00:44:41.979
who painted the small ceiling frescoes representing
the four elements we mentioned earlier,

00:44:42.279 --> 00:44:45.516
as well as the central octagon at the ceiling's apex,

00:44:45.516 --> 00:44:48.085
featuring Julius's coat of arms.

00:44:48.619 --> 00:44:52.556
Why would the young Raphael opt to include himself

00:44:52.556 --> 00:44:58.195
in a sweeping, comprehensive work dedicated to portraying
history's greatest philosophers?

00:44:59.363 --> 00:45:04.001
Like many aspects of this remarkable
painting, it's not entirely clear.

00:45:04.702 --> 00:45:06.804
But over 500 years later,

00:45:06.804 --> 00:45:10.641
now that the School of Athens
has unquestionably established itself

00:45:10.641 --> 00:45:14.144
as the single most iconic visual representation

00:45:14.144 --> 00:45:18.182
of what philosophy is,
it hardly seems inappropriate.

00:45:25.055 --> 00:45:28.692
As we plunge deeper
into an examination of the painting,

00:45:28.692 --> 00:45:34.431
let's first return to a general consideration
of Raphael’s use of architecture.

00:45:34.431 --> 00:45:37.301
To put matters in their proper context,

00:45:37.301 --> 00:45:41.638
it should be first noted that,
while Raphael was only in his mid-twenties

00:45:41.638 --> 00:45:45.576
when he began the School of Athens,
there were already many distinct

00:45:45.576 --> 00:45:49.780
visual traces of his ongoing fascination
with architecture

00:45:49.780 --> 00:45:54.284
throughout much of his previous work—
a fascination that he would begin

00:45:54.284 --> 00:45:58.021
to concretely act upon
shortly after his arrival in Rome,

00:45:58.489 --> 00:46:01.959
culminating in him being named
the Vatican's new chief architect

00:46:02.092 --> 00:46:05.496
upon the death of Bramante in 1514.

00:46:06.263 --> 00:46:10.467
Architecture, and particularly classical Roman architecture,

00:46:10.467 --> 00:46:15.906
strongly resonated with Rafael's innate sense of balance
and spatial harmony,

00:46:15.906 --> 00:46:21.411
and often provided a central,
reinforcing visual context to his works—

00:46:21.411 --> 00:46:25.549
most famously of all in the School of Athens.

00:46:25.549 --> 00:46:31.822
It’s hard to think of a more revealing example
of the power of architecture in art.

00:46:31.822 --> 00:46:34.758
And a central feature of that power,

00:46:34.758 --> 00:46:37.294
like many other aspects of this painting,

00:46:37.294 --> 00:46:44.768
lies in its beguiling union of the obvious and the subtle
that seamlessly merge into one compelling whole

00:46:44.768 --> 00:46:48.472
to act on the viewer in both
a conscious and unconscious way.

00:46:49.506 --> 00:46:52.576
You hardly need to be a historian
or an art critic

00:46:52.576 --> 00:46:53.644
to appreciate that

00:46:53.644 --> 00:46:58.315
the imposing architectural structure
that dwarfs all of the figures within it

00:46:58.682 --> 00:47:02.386
conveys an almost overwhelming
sense of grandeur to the scene:

00:47:02.886 --> 00:47:05.756
a vivid exemplar of the new golden age

00:47:05.756 --> 00:47:10.027
that Julius and his court were so convinced
that they were ushering in.

00:47:11.061 --> 00:47:15.799
But despite their fulsome appreciation
of the merits of philosophical activity,

00:47:15.799 --> 00:47:19.937
this new golden age was most assuredly
a Christian one,

00:47:20.370 --> 00:47:23.674
as directly reflected
in that very architecture,

00:47:23.674 --> 00:47:26.577
with its constant references
to the Trinity:

00:47:26.577 --> 00:47:32.950
from the three consecutive dominating arches bounding
three separate sections of the sky

00:47:32.950 --> 00:47:37.955
that culminate in the partially obscured
three-part opening at the very top.

00:47:39.022 --> 00:47:42.392
Indeed, the very dominance of the architecture,

00:47:42.392 --> 00:47:46.396
along with the fact that its full extent
necessarily lies beyond

00:47:46.396 --> 00:47:51.201
our field of view, is itself a metaphor
for the majesty of God

00:47:51.201 --> 00:47:55.372
that we cannot fully comprehend,
but only glimpse at—

00:47:55.372 --> 00:48:01.979
just like the unseen source of the divine golden rays
on the Disputa on the opposite wall.

00:48:01.979 --> 00:48:04.081
Given all of that,

00:48:04.081 --> 00:48:07.217
it's hardly surprising
that some believe that the architecture

00:48:07.217 --> 00:48:09.519
in the School of Athens contains allusions

00:48:09.519 --> 00:48:13.123
to the new Saint Peter's Basilica
that Bramante was then planning,

00:48:13.824 --> 00:48:15.592
with the presumed central cupola

00:48:15.592 --> 00:48:19.496
above the area that Plato and Aristotle
had just walked through

00:48:19.496 --> 00:48:24.334
alluding to his Greek cross design; yet
another concrete example

00:48:24.334 --> 00:48:28.205
of how Rome had supplanted
both Athens and Jerusalem

00:48:28.205 --> 00:48:31.575
as the world's intellectual
and spiritual centre.

00:48:32.476 --> 00:48:36.213
Others, meanwhile, see references
to ancient Roman ruins

00:48:36.213 --> 00:48:40.851
like the Baths of Diocletian
or the four-sided Janus Arch,

00:48:40.851 --> 00:48:47.324
a possible allusion to Egidio da Viterbo’s
obsession with the ancient Etruscan god Janus,

00:48:47.324 --> 00:48:52.062
whom he somehow regularly
associated with the biblical Noah.

00:48:52.562 --> 00:48:56.934
And while all of that might well be on
the more speculative side of things,

00:48:56.934 --> 00:49:00.904
it's hard to deny that the barrel vault
pattern on the arches

00:49:00.904 --> 00:49:06.176
is identical to those of an ancient Roman
basilica found in the nearby Forum,

00:49:06.176 --> 00:49:12.382
a subtle reference to Raphael's determination
to graft aspects of Roman archaeology

00:49:12.382 --> 00:49:17.587
onto a scene dominated by Greek thinkers.

00:49:18.822 --> 00:49:23.860
And then there are the two prominent statues placed above
the School of Athens’ figures

00:49:23.860 --> 00:49:27.064
on opposite sides of the central passageway:

00:49:27.064 --> 00:49:31.702
Apollo holding a liar
in an exaggerated contrapposto pose

00:49:31.702 --> 00:49:35.872
that seems to be a clear reference
to the celebrated ancient piece of jewelry,

00:49:36.239 --> 00:49:40.510
known as the Seal of Nero,
that was in Lorenzo de’ Medici's collection

00:49:40.510 --> 00:49:45.983
and was famously worn by Simonetta Vespucci
in Botticelli's celebrated portrait of her;

00:49:45.983 --> 00:49:50.387
and Minerva, the Roman equivalent of Athena,

00:49:50.387 --> 00:49:53.824
glancing down towards her celebrated Medusa-head shield,

00:49:53.824 --> 00:49:58.395
for whom there fortunately exists one of Raphael's rare
preparatory sketches.

00:49:59.730 --> 00:50:03.133
These statues
also contain several levels of meaning:

00:50:03.467 --> 00:50:07.137
on the one hand straightforwardly
representing the overlap

00:50:07.137 --> 00:50:12.309
between philosophy and two other subjects
of the Stanza: poetry and jurisprudence—

00:50:12.843 --> 00:50:15.879
with Apollo, god of music and poetry,

00:50:15.879 --> 00:50:20.450
naturally placed on the side near the Parnassus,
where he's the central figure,

00:50:21.251 --> 00:50:24.788
and Minerva,
the goddess of wisdom, justice and law,

00:50:25.355 --> 00:50:28.759
adjacent to the wall
representing jurisprudence.

00:50:29.292 --> 00:50:32.396
But many also believe that these statues
refer to the different

00:50:32.396 --> 00:50:36.366
philosophical approaches
associated with Plato and Aristotle,

00:50:37.000 --> 00:50:43.240
with Minerva reflecting the experiment-driven,
typically visual pursuits favoured by Aristotle,

00:50:43.240 --> 00:50:46.977
illustrated by the many astronomers, mathematicians,

00:50:46.977 --> 00:50:50.280
and even painters placed on the right hand
side of the painting

00:50:50.280 --> 00:50:53.517
and reinforced by the smaller frieze
underneath her,

00:50:53.517 --> 00:50:57.521
depicting an allegorical figure
of Reason or scientific inquiry;

00:50:58.922 --> 00:51:01.725
and Apollo, on Plato's side,

00:51:01.725 --> 00:51:06.096
characterizing the search for divine
illumination through the more spiritual,

00:51:06.096 --> 00:51:11.301
typically auditory, pursuits of rhetoric,
dialectic, and music

00:51:11.301 --> 00:51:17.574
that, if properly listened to, have the power
to elevate man from his all-too-frequent

00:51:17.574 --> 00:51:22.446
violent and lustful passions,
as depicted in the two friezes below him.

00:51:23.547 --> 00:51:27.284
And this distinction between Aristotle's
earthy empiricism

00:51:27.551 --> 00:51:30.120
and Plato's heavenward idealism

00:51:30.120 --> 00:51:31.655
is further reinforced

00:51:31.655 --> 00:51:35.058
by the distant medallions on the middle
arch behind them,

00:51:35.225 --> 00:51:39.262
with a man looking heavenwards on the left
hand side and on the right

00:51:39.496 --> 00:51:43.133
a woman surveying the scene
below her while holding a globe.

00:51:44.734 --> 00:51:49.039
And it also bears mentioning that
the enormously influential fifth century

00:51:49.039 --> 00:51:52.676
didactic allegory,
on the Marriage of Philology and Mercury,

00:51:52.843 --> 00:51:55.445
that firmly established
the seven liberal arts

00:51:55.445 --> 00:51:59.182
into educational practices
for well over a thousand years,

00:51:59.983 --> 00:52:05.188
glowingly refers to:
“Harmony, who walks between Apollo and Minerva,”

00:52:05.789 --> 00:52:10.627
a powerful metaphor literally transformed
into the actual physical path

00:52:10.627 --> 00:52:13.964
taken by our strolling philosophical focal points,

00:52:13.964 --> 00:52:18.168
who jointly incarnate this vital concept of harmony.

00:52:19.503 --> 00:52:23.573
Indeed, harmony is a constant theme
throughout this entire work,

00:52:23.573 --> 00:52:26.676
with its beguiling balance
of an underlying symmetry

00:52:26.676 --> 00:52:30.113
that strongly reinforces a sense of divine order,

00:52:30.113 --> 00:52:35.352
with the beautiful classical structure and patterned floor
tile in perfect perspective;

00:52:36.119 --> 00:52:40.023
and captivating asymmetry that continually ensures

00:52:40.023 --> 00:52:44.494
that the scene we're witnessing
never descends into placid uniformity,

00:52:44.995 --> 00:52:49.032
as emphasized by the beautiful
classical Greek meander pattern

00:52:49.032 --> 00:52:53.470
on the inner archway,
the surrounding statues and friezes,

00:52:54.137 --> 00:52:59.709
and,  of course, the many fascinating individual figures throughout.

00:53:01.545 --> 00:53:05.615
In fact, even those figures manage
to simultaneously express

00:53:05.615 --> 00:53:09.386
symmetry and asymmetry
in a subtly harmonious way.

00:53:10.487 --> 00:53:12.822
Take a closer look at the two groups who line

00:53:12.822 --> 00:53:16.226
Plato and Aristotle’s joint entrance into the scene.

00:53:16.226 --> 00:53:20.063
Each row ends with an absorbed follower
gazing intently

00:53:20.063 --> 00:53:23.934
upon his respective hero,
with his neighbors arm on his shoulder.

00:53:24.734 --> 00:53:28.138
And each row contains
gesticulating supporters,

00:53:28.505 --> 00:53:33.210
but there are only five on Plato’s side
and seven on Aristotle's—

00:53:33.476 --> 00:53:36.012
if we include the half-obscured face at the rear.

00:53:37.314 --> 00:53:39.149
Meanwhile, outside of

00:53:39.149 --> 00:53:42.552
the central group of Plato, Aristotle,
and their followers,

00:53:43.253 --> 00:53:47.057
we see two people
entering the space on Plato's side,

00:53:47.057 --> 00:53:50.794
which is balanced by two people
leaving on Aristotle's;

00:53:51.561 --> 00:53:55.098
in a similar way to how, on the main
horizontal axis,

00:53:55.498 --> 00:53:58.902
we have one person rushing into the scene
on the left,

00:53:59.302 --> 00:54:02.672
balanced by another rushing away on the right.

00:54:04.474 --> 00:54:08.979
And while several notable characters
appear in apparently wilful isolation,

00:54:09.713 --> 00:54:13.083
many are presented in strongly
interacting groups:

00:54:14.084 --> 00:54:16.886
from the four students
clustered around Euclid,

00:54:16.886 --> 00:54:21.358
all vividly displaying different stages
of comprehension or confusion

00:54:21.358 --> 00:54:24.928
revealingly characteristic
of the philosophical experience,

00:54:25.528 --> 00:54:29.599
to the straightforwardly transparent way
that Zoroaster and Ptolemy

00:54:29.599 --> 00:54:33.303
hold up their globes
for everyone around them to plainly see,

00:54:34.137 --> 00:54:37.340
to the series of furtive,
over-the-shoulder glances

00:54:37.340 --> 00:54:40.410
exhibited by those near
the Pythagorean diagram,

00:54:40.410 --> 00:54:45.181
possibly referencing the famously secretive nature
of the Pythagorean brotherhood,

00:54:46.082 --> 00:54:49.986
to the varying reactions to Socrates's
forceful explication,

00:54:50.654 --> 00:54:56.660
from rapt attention to sceptical detachment,
to absent-minded daydreaming,

00:54:57.260 --> 00:55:01.898
all while a distracted fifth
figure seems to emphatically shoo away any

00:55:01.898 --> 00:55:06.336
incoming written documentation potentially
relevant to the discussion at hand.

00:55:08.738 --> 00:55:11.308
But intriguingly, very rarely

00:55:11.308 --> 00:55:15.945
does anyone take the slightest notice
of a figure outside of his own circle.

00:55:16.913 --> 00:55:21.484
The only obvious exceptions
are the two figures midway up the steps,

00:55:22.052 --> 00:55:26.423
with one seemingly gesturing towards
the wilfully oblivious Diogenes

00:55:27.090 --> 00:55:31.227
and the other towards the central figures
of Aristotle and Plato,

00:55:31.995 --> 00:55:36.433
while the red cloaked
Solon, Plotinus, Aristarchus,

00:55:36.666 --> 00:55:39.903
Carneades,, Zeno, or whoever

00:55:39.903 --> 00:55:42.105
appears to look sceptically on.

00:55:43.973 --> 00:55:45.408
Taken as a whole,

00:55:45.408 --> 00:55:50.814
the figures represent an intense, densely-populated
array of philosophical activity

00:55:51.247 --> 00:55:54.584
that illustrates both common
and individualistic aspects

00:55:54.584 --> 00:55:59.356
of the human condition that is vitally
balanced by the dominant architecture.

00:56:00.990 --> 00:56:04.928
Take it away, and you have a scene
that is overwhelmingly cluttered

00:56:04.928 --> 00:56:07.764
and largely unintelligible.

00:56:07.764 --> 00:56:13.002
But formulated as it is, we're presented
with a remarkably harmonious vision

00:56:13.002 --> 00:56:18.007
of both the diverse power of the human
intellect and its limitations.

00:56:20.844 --> 00:56:24.748
And the astute viewer is presented with something
else here too:

00:56:24.748 --> 00:56:30.353
a captivating visual window on key aspects
of the contemporary High Renaissance world,

00:56:30.987 --> 00:56:34.391
some of which we've already mentioned.

00:56:35.191 --> 00:56:38.328
There's Donato Bramante
as the stooping Euclid,

00:56:38.328 --> 00:56:42.799
who wears a collar embedded with Raphael's RSVM signature,

00:56:42.799 --> 00:56:46.069
proudly announcing his artistic accomplishment to the world.

00:56:47.337 --> 00:56:52.675
Tommaso Inghirami
as Epicurus, Democritus, or someone else,

00:56:53.843 --> 00:56:57.580
quite possibly Egidio da Viterbo as Zoroaster—

00:56:58.248 --> 00:57:03.820
not to mention Raphael himself
as perhaps the famous Greek painter Apelles

00:57:03.820 --> 00:57:08.191
together with Il Sodoma or Perugino or Timoteo Viti

00:57:08.591 --> 00:57:11.995
as Apelles’ friendly rival Protogenes.

00:57:12.462 --> 00:57:14.297
But there are others:

00:57:14.297 --> 00:57:18.435
the angelic youngster who gazes out at us
on the left hand side of the painting,

00:57:18.868 --> 00:57:22.906
is widely regarded to represent
Francesco Maria della Rovere,

00:57:22.906 --> 00:57:27.043
Julius's young nephew,
who'd just become the new Duke of Urbino.

00:57:27.744 --> 00:57:29.179
While Vasari tells us

00:57:29.179 --> 00:57:33.450
that one of the young students
huddled around Euclid is Federico Gonzaga,

00:57:33.750 --> 00:57:38.421
the young Duke of Mantua, who'd spent
much of his youth in Julius’ papal court.

00:57:39.522 --> 00:57:41.858
Most famously of all, perhaps

00:57:41.858 --> 00:57:46.262
it's how Plato seems to bear
a striking resemblance to Leonardo da Vinci,

00:57:46.262 --> 00:57:49.999
the artistic genius 31 years older than Raphael,

00:57:49.999 --> 00:57:53.536
who'd had such
a profound impact on his art.

00:57:53.536 --> 00:57:59.709
Indeed, the similarities between Leonardo
and the Plato character go well beyond the fact,

00:57:59.709 --> 00:58:02.745
with Plato's famous upward-thrusting finger

00:58:02.745 --> 00:58:08.918
quite possibly also alluding to Leonardo's frequent
use of pointing fingers in his own works.

00:58:09.986 --> 00:58:13.189
And the Leonardo references
don't end there.

00:58:13.189 --> 00:58:16.759
The seated fellow peering
anxiously over Pythagoras's shoulder,

00:58:17.894 --> 00:58:21.698
is unmistakably a direct
quote of a character from Leonardo's

00:58:21.698 --> 00:58:26.169
hugely influential, unfinished
painting of the Adoration of the Magi.

00:58:27.103 --> 00:58:31.074
Indeed, Raphael was to later
use the same figure again

00:58:31.074 --> 00:58:35.178
in what many believe was
his final painting, The Transfiguration.

00:58:36.312 --> 00:58:39.415
But Leonardo was hardly
the only celebrated artist

00:58:39.415 --> 00:58:42.252
implicitly referred to in the School of Athens.

00:58:42.585 --> 00:58:45.154
A closer look at the figures on the extreme right

00:58:45.154 --> 00:58:48.791
side of the painting reveals
that they are an unmistakable

00:58:48.791 --> 00:58:51.361
reference to those in a similar position

00:58:51.361 --> 00:58:55.598
in Donatello’s Paduan relief of The Miracle of the Miser’s Heart

00:58:55.598 --> 00:59:00.603
that the all-observing Raphael had also clearly
studied very carefully.

00:59:02.005 --> 00:59:03.273
Lastly,

00:59:03.273 --> 00:59:06.643
there's the figure generally believed
to be Heraclitus,

00:59:06.643 --> 00:59:10.513
who's intriguingly not present
on the surviving cartoon in Milan,

00:59:10.780 --> 00:59:14.884
along with images of Raphael and his
artistic colleague on the far right.

00:59:15.952 --> 00:59:19.622
The commonly-held view
that he's also a portrait of Michelangelo

00:59:19.622 --> 00:59:23.593
is by no means universally accepted by art historians.

00:59:23.927 --> 00:59:28.331
His face seems to be considerably rounder
than we would expect for starters.

00:59:28.331 --> 00:59:29.832
But there's little doubt

00:59:29.832 --> 00:59:34.704
that his muscular, twisting,
contemplative pose does immediately

00:59:34.704 --> 00:59:40.076
bring to mind the remarkably innovative
torsion-filled figures that Michelangelo

00:59:40.076 --> 00:59:43.446
had just finished painting on the Sistine Chapel ceiling,

00:59:43.446 --> 00:59:48.518
providing considerable indirect support for the rumour
that Raphael,

00:59:48.518 --> 00:59:52.155
probably through the influence of
his powerful friend Bramante,

00:59:52.155 --> 00:59:58.761
had been granted a few sneak peeks inside the Chapel
well before its official 1512 opening,

00:59:59.762 --> 01:00:01.397
thereby setting the stage for

01:00:01.397 --> 01:00:05.902
the increasingly acrimonious battles
with Michelangelo in the years to follow.

01:00:06.603 --> 01:00:08.671
But that's another story.

01:00:13.776 --> 01:00:17.447
And just like Michelangelo's
iconic Sistine Chapel ceiling,

01:00:17.447 --> 01:00:22.819
with which it's so frequently paired, it's
extraordinarily difficult to rigorously

01:00:22.819 --> 01:00:27.423
assess the precise, historic impact
of a painting as hugely influential

01:00:27.423 --> 01:00:31.894
as the School of Athens, since its creation
over five centuries ago.

01:00:32.528 --> 01:00:35.398
Where do you even begin?

01:00:35.398 --> 01:00:39.469
From tapestries to woodcuts to frescoes,

01:00:39.469 --> 01:00:43.873
both the full painting
and many of its figures have been copied,

01:00:44.107 --> 01:00:49.746
reinterpreted and reworked so many times
in so many different ways

01:00:50.246 --> 01:00:54.250
that it's become one of those rare
works of art that has even managed

01:00:54.250 --> 01:00:58.988
to transcend art itself, becoming
nothing less than the universal

01:00:58.988 --> 01:01:03.126
go-to image of the timeless merits
of philosophical engagement.

01:01:04.093 --> 01:01:09.732
Which makes it all the more ironic to consider
that that might not actually be the message

01:01:09.732 --> 01:01:12.802
that Raphael was trying to convey in the first place.

01:01:13.369 --> 01:01:17.974
Because when Giorgio Vasari discussed
the work in his biography of Raphael,

01:01:18.374 --> 01:01:23.713
whose first edition appeared
in 1550, 30 years after Raphael's death,

01:01:23.713 --> 01:01:26.315
he curiously described it as:

01:01:26.315 --> 01:01:31.387
“theologians reconciling philosophy and astrology with theology”,

01:01:31.387 --> 01:01:35.191
which is considerably different
from the glowing depiction of diverse

01:01:35.191 --> 01:01:39.529
philosophical traditions that we now
all unhesitatingly subscribe to.

01:01:40.430 --> 01:01:43.232
And for over 350 years now,

01:01:43.232 --> 01:01:47.303
the common view of art historians
is that he simply goofed—

01:01:47.303 --> 01:01:51.808
with associated explanations
ranging from a poor memory

01:01:51.808 --> 01:01:55.178
to a congenital tendency to making up lies

01:01:55.178 --> 01:01:59.015
to a lazy reliance
upon inaccurate contemporary prints.

01:01:59.716 --> 01:02:04.854
Indeed, if you turn to any standard expert
description of the School of Athens these days

01:02:04.854 --> 01:02:07.790
you won't see Vasari's unusual interpretation

01:02:07.790 --> 01:02:12.095
taken the slightest bit seriously;
and you might not even find it mentioned.

01:02:12.862 --> 01:02:16.299
Which is why, in my recent
biographical film on Raphael,

01:02:16.799 --> 01:02:21.838
I only treated it in the briefest of terms
and pretty disparagingly.

01:02:21.838 --> 01:02:25.708
But now it looks like
I might have been far too hasty,

01:02:25.708 --> 01:02:29.312
because, as a few sharp-eyed
scholars have pointed out,

01:02:29.512 --> 01:02:34.183
this was hardly a simple slip of the pen
or a momentary memory failure.

01:02:35.184 --> 01:02:38.588
The majority of Vasari’s detailed descriptions
of the painting,

01:02:39.021 --> 01:02:43.893
from Diogenes to Plato and Aristotle
and the texts that they're holding,

01:02:44.360 --> 01:02:50.333
to Bramante as a geometer,
to Zoroaster, to Raphael himself,

01:02:50.333 --> 01:02:53.970
correspond exactly
with what we now believe.

01:02:54.337 --> 01:02:58.307
But then he goes on to also insist
that the painting contains

01:02:58.307 --> 01:03:03.412
“geomagnetic and astrological figures
that are then passed by several beautiful

01:03:03.412 --> 01:03:07.850
angels to the Evangelists,
who, in turn, elucidate them,”

01:03:08.885 --> 01:03:13.422
while adding: “it's hard to describe
adequately the beauty and compassion

01:03:13.422 --> 01:03:18.594
seen in the heads and figures of the Evangelists,
who are convincingly depicted deep

01:03:18.594 --> 01:03:23.199
in thought and concentration,
especially those who are writing”;

01:03:23.199 --> 01:03:27.970
before declaring that the figure now
universally viewed as Pythagoras,

01:03:27.970 --> 01:03:31.474
is actually a depiction of Saint Matthew.

01:03:32.542 --> 01:03:35.912
What on earth is going on?

01:03:37.046 --> 01:03:40.616
Well, the basic idea seems to be
that Vasari is saying

01:03:40.616 --> 01:03:45.321
that the painting demonstrates how ancient
wisdom traditions, such as Pythagorean

01:03:45.321 --> 01:03:49.225
insights on the inherent harmony
between music and mathematics,

01:03:49.225 --> 01:03:52.261
become firmly inculcated in Christianity.

01:03:55.965 --> 01:03:58.467
We saw earlier how this general belief

01:03:58.467 --> 01:04:02.572
resonated strongly with the humanist
climate of Julius's papal court;

01:04:03.206 --> 01:04:06.142
and when it comes to Pythagoras in particular,

01:04:06.142 --> 01:04:10.980
we know that the influential 15th century
German bishop, Nicholas of Cusa,

01:04:10.980 --> 01:04:14.083
had written about how the Pythagorean tetractys,

01:04:14.483 --> 01:04:19.222
their “divine triangular number ten”,
detailed in Raphael's diagram,

01:04:19.589 --> 01:04:24.560
explicitly demonstrated what he called
“the higher light of theological reason”.

01:04:25.461 --> 01:04:27.897
For Nicholas of Cusa, in other words,

01:04:27.897 --> 01:04:31.300
just like for Marsilio Ficino, as we saw earlier,

01:04:31.968 --> 01:04:35.371
the whole point of philosophy in
the first place

01:04:35.371 --> 01:04:38.774
was to sharpen
one's theological understanding;

01:04:38.774 --> 01:04:42.044
with both philosophy
and the seven liberal arts,

01:04:42.044 --> 01:04:46.749
straightforwardly regarded as simply tools
for theological enlightenment.

01:04:48.084 --> 01:04:51.954
Meanwhile, both when Raphael
was composing his masterpieces

01:04:51.954 --> 01:04:55.391
and several decades later,
when Vasari was writing about them,

01:04:56.058 --> 01:04:59.662
astrology had a very different
meaning and reputation

01:04:59.662 --> 01:05:01.964
than it was to have centuries later.

01:05:01.964 --> 01:05:08.604
In the 16th century, it was a cutting-edge
science linked to an established Aristotelian framework,

01:05:08.604 --> 01:05:11.307
fully resonant with the pursuit of “the knowledge of causes”

01:05:11.307 --> 01:05:15.478
associated with the allegorical figure of philosophy,

01:05:15.478 --> 01:05:19.882
wearing her four-coloured Earth, Air,
Fire, and Water dress—

01:05:19.882 --> 01:05:25.354
something else explicitly,
and accurately, described by Vasari.

01:05:26.455 --> 01:05:30.793
And if you look closely, the frieze below
the statue of Minerva,

01:05:30.793 --> 01:05:35.431
the one depicting an allegorical figure
of Reason or scientific inquiry,

01:05:36.032 --> 01:05:39.201
also appears to contain a picture of Leo,

01:05:39.201 --> 01:05:42.738
the zodiacal sign identified with Rome.

01:05:43.172 --> 01:05:47.677
Astrology, in short, was seen
as a completely legitimate discipline,

01:05:47.910 --> 01:05:54.216
effectively indistinguishable
from astronomy, that as so-called “natural theology”

01:05:54.216 --> 01:05:57.353
could be fully integrated
within a Christian framework

01:05:57.353 --> 01:06:00.489
to better appreciate God's divine plan;

01:06:00.489 --> 01:06:05.127
and was enthusiastically practiced
by many famous Renaissance personalities,

01:06:05.461 --> 01:06:09.532
including Pope Julius himself,
which helps explain why

01:06:09.532 --> 01:06:15.171
the rectangular ceiling fresco of Urania,
what Vasari calls astrology,

01:06:15.471 --> 01:06:20.443
contains within it a specific stellar
configuration only visible in Rome

01:06:20.443 --> 01:06:24.714
during the time of Julius's papal
coronation that was held in late October.

01:06:26.749 --> 01:06:28.751
So when you consider it carefully,

01:06:28.751 --> 01:06:33.923
Vasari’s interpretation is a lot less absurd
than it might seem at first glance.

01:06:34.890 --> 01:06:38.861
Concretely, it would mean that the figures
in the left foreground,

01:06:38.861 --> 01:06:43.833
who are now typically referred to
as Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Pythagoras,

01:06:44.433 --> 01:06:47.703
are in fact three of the Evangelists,

01:06:47.703 --> 01:06:52.074
with the fourth likely the white-clad
figure referring to Saint John;

01:06:52.074 --> 01:06:57.713
here not engaged in the act of writing
because he's already been shown to be doing so

01:06:57.713 --> 01:06:59.915
in the Disputa on the opposite wall,

01:07:00.349 --> 01:07:04.653
reinforced by the corresponding angel
holding up his finished Gospel

01:07:04.653 --> 01:07:08.190
and looking directly at him.

01:07:09.658 --> 01:07:14.497
And while the fact that one of the four
Evangelists is absent from our surviving cartoon

01:07:14.497 --> 01:07:17.867
is clearly problematic
for Vasari's interpretation,

01:07:17.867 --> 01:07:21.504
it's certainly not an outright refutation
either.

01:07:21.871 --> 01:07:26.042
Perhaps Raphael had created several
different possibilities for the fourth

01:07:26.042 --> 01:07:31.147
Evangelical figure to occupy that large,
prominent space, and was simply waiting

01:07:31.147 --> 01:07:35.418
to see which option was most favoured
by Julius and his followers.

01:07:35.418 --> 01:07:41.123
Maybe a later, more complete cartoon,
was created, which is now lost.

01:07:41.123 --> 01:07:42.758
We'll likely never know.

01:07:44.226 --> 01:07:46.796
What we do know, on the other hand,

01:07:46.796 --> 01:07:51.400
is that Vasari had extensive
personal experience with Raphael's world.

01:07:52.201 --> 01:07:56.038
He was intimately familiar
with all of his Vatican frescoes,

01:07:56.038 --> 01:07:59.041
which he studied in great detail
as a student

01:07:59.041 --> 01:08:03.245
and saw on several later occasions;
and he developed close relationships

01:08:03.245 --> 01:08:07.283
with several people who'd worked directly with Raphael—

01:08:07.283 --> 01:08:12.421
most notably Giulio Romano,
Raphael's most gifted student

01:08:12.421 --> 01:08:16.759
who became a hugely accomplished painter
and architect in his own right.

01:08:17.893 --> 01:08:21.363
And then there's the fact,
as we pointed out earlier,

01:08:21.363 --> 01:08:26.335
that there does seem to be a particularly large number
of specific points of overlap

01:08:26.335 --> 01:08:30.039
between the School of Athens
and the Disputa on the opposite wall.

01:08:30.973 --> 01:08:36.412
Indeed, an early study for the Disputa
even has the arms of the Christ figure

01:08:36.412 --> 01:08:41.484
intriguingly combining those of Plato
and Aristotle in the School of Athens.

01:08:42.685 --> 01:08:44.820
But perhaps the biggest reason of all

01:08:44.820 --> 01:08:49.792
to think that there might be something to Vasari's view
is that for the better part of a century,

01:08:50.059 --> 01:08:54.263
everyone else seemed to broadly agree
with the idea that the painting

01:08:54.263 --> 01:08:56.832
we now know of as “The School of Athens”

01:08:56.832 --> 01:09:03.139
was actually a detailed representation
of how a diverse array of ancient wisdom traditions

01:09:03.139 --> 01:09:07.810
naturally culminated
in an explicitly Christian worldview.

01:09:08.377 --> 01:09:12.848
Agostino Veneziano, who joined
the printmaking workshop of Raphael's

01:09:12.848 --> 01:09:17.153
engraver collaborator Marcantonio
Raimondi around 1515,

01:09:17.153 --> 01:09:19.221
and worked with Giulio Romano

01:09:19.221 --> 01:09:23.459
on a series of prints of the Four
Evangelists a few years later,

01:09:23.459 --> 01:09:29.598
famously made an engraving of figures in the left
foreground of the School of Athens in 1523,

01:09:29.598 --> 01:09:32.635
only three years after Raphael's death,

01:09:32.635 --> 01:09:37.673
with the Pythagorean diagram
now replaced by the Greek text of Ave Maria

01:09:37.673 --> 01:09:41.610
held by a wingless angel;
while the adjacent seated figure

01:09:41.610 --> 01:09:44.613
is writing more Greek text
from the Book of Luke,

01:09:44.613 --> 01:09:48.017
thereby identifying him as that Evangelist.

01:09:48.384 --> 01:09:53.088
Meanwhile, another artist associated
with Raimondi, Jacopo Caraglio,

01:09:53.088 --> 01:09:57.493
created a print of what many consider
to be a seated Saint Paul,

01:09:57.493 --> 01:10:02.097
preaching among a group of Athenian philosophers
as described in the Book of Acts.

01:10:03.265 --> 01:10:05.601
And then in 1550,

01:10:05.601 --> 01:10:09.538
the engraver Giorgio Ghisi, created a visually accurate

01:10:09.538 --> 01:10:15.511
print of Raphael's entire fresco,
but with the Pythagorean diagram now blank,

01:10:15.511 --> 01:10:18.480
and with an added text in the bottom left corner

01:10:18.480 --> 01:10:21.984
referring to Paul preaching in Athens
as described in that

01:10:21.984 --> 01:10:25.387
same passage from the Book of Acts.

01:10:25.387 --> 01:10:28.257
And while the art theorist
Raffaello Borghini

01:10:28.257 --> 01:10:34.029
reiterated Vasari's interpretation
of the painting in his 1584 work Il Riposo,

01:10:34.029 --> 01:10:38.834
the pioneering artist and art historian Gian Paolo Lomazzo

01:10:38.834 --> 01:10:42.137
seems to have been sufficiently influenced by Ghisi’s print

01:10:42.137 --> 01:10:45.507
to write that the principal subject of Raphael's work

01:10:45.507 --> 01:10:48.944
was actually a depiction of Saint Paul
preaching in Athens—

01:10:48.944 --> 01:10:54.049
a view taken to its ultimately
bizarre conclusion some 70 years later

01:10:54.049 --> 01:10:57.886
by Francesco Scannelli,
where he maintains that

01:10:57.886 --> 01:11:03.192
the central figures of Plato and Aristotle
actually are Saints Peter and Paul.

01:11:04.793 --> 01:11:06.061
But by this point,

01:11:06.061 --> 01:11:09.665
increasing numbers of people
had steadily begun to pare away

01:11:09.665 --> 01:11:13.068
any mention of a Christian
theological subtext.

01:11:14.570 --> 01:11:17.306
The painter and writer Gaspare Celio

01:11:17.306 --> 01:11:21.076
was the first known person
to refer to the fresco as simply

01:11:21.076 --> 01:11:26.115
“The School of Athens”, in his 1638
guidebook to Roman Art,

01:11:26.115 --> 01:11:29.451
a title later endorsed by André Félibien,

01:11:29.451 --> 01:11:33.122
the architect and official court
historian to Louis XIV,

01:11:33.122 --> 01:11:36.759
and the Italian art historian
Filippo Baldinucci,

01:11:37.226 --> 01:11:41.597
both of whom stressed the classical
literary orientation of the work,

01:11:42.264 --> 01:11:47.002
a view that the influential French
art historian Roland Fréart de Chambray

01:11:47.002 --> 01:11:50.306
had emphatically trumpeted
over 20 years earlier,

01:11:50.306 --> 01:11:55.611
furiously decrying that Vasari, that
“great utterer of nonsense”,

01:11:55.611 --> 01:12:01.583
had completely missed Raphael's obvious desire
to focus purely on ancient philosophers.

01:12:02.451 --> 01:12:05.287
De Chambray’s fulminations were reiterated

01:12:05.287 --> 01:12:10.225
considerably more calmly and insightfully
by the great late 17th century

01:12:10.225 --> 01:12:15.331
art historian Giovanni Pietro Bellori,
who rejected the presence of theologians

01:12:15.331 --> 01:12:19.468
and Evangelists in the painting,
which he called “The Gymnasium”,

01:12:19.468 --> 01:12:24.173
arguing that Vasari had confused it
with the Disputa; and was the first

01:12:24.173 --> 01:12:27.576
to successfully interpret
the Pythagorean diagram—

01:12:27.676 --> 01:12:29.545
he also got the spelling right—

01:12:29.545 --> 01:12:33.816
leading him to propose that the seated figure
by the Pythagorean diagram

01:12:33.816 --> 01:12:36.318
was none other than Pythagoras himself—

01:12:36.885 --> 01:12:40.289
an identification that has remained with us ever since,

01:12:40.289 --> 01:12:42.791
despite the fact that, when you think about,

01:12:42.791 --> 01:12:45.260
it's pretty curious why Pythagoras

01:12:45.260 --> 01:12:50.599
would need to have his own celebrated insights
placed in front of him to help inspire him

01:12:50.599 --> 01:12:54.536
as he writes his thoughts down,
in what does very much look like a Bible.

01:12:55.404 --> 01:13:00.509
After all, Plato and Aristotle weren't
carefully studying their own books,

01:13:00.509 --> 01:13:04.847
they were just carrying them around
to visually represent their views.

01:13:06.548 --> 01:13:09.385
But by the time the 18th century rolled around,

01:13:09.385 --> 01:13:14.523
the conviction that Vasari was grossly in
error had become even further reinforced

01:13:14.523 --> 01:13:17.226
by his explicit invocation of astrology.

01:13:17.993 --> 01:13:21.196
The Vatican librarian
Giovanni Gaetano Bottari,

01:13:21.196 --> 01:13:26.769
in his 1759 edition of Vasari’s Lives, angrily declared:

01:13:26.769 --> 01:13:32.708
“Astrology is a vain and false science,
detested by philosophers and theologians”,

01:13:32.708 --> 01:13:36.912
completely missing the rather obvious point that to Vasari,

01:13:36.912 --> 01:13:41.183
writing some 200 years earlier,
the word “astrology”

01:13:41.183 --> 01:13:45.854
meant something quite different indeed,
from what Bottari understood by the term.

01:13:46.889 --> 01:13:48.757
A hundred years later still,

01:13:48.757 --> 01:13:52.294
the renowned German art historian Anton Springer

01:13:52.294 --> 01:13:59.067
explicitly recognized the significant overlap between philosophy
and theology in 16th-century Italy,

01:13:59.067 --> 01:14:02.738
but nonetheless maintained
that Vasari had been significantly

01:14:02.738 --> 01:14:06.141
led astray by the earlier prints
we've just discussed.

01:14:06.408 --> 01:14:08.377
Which is, of course, possible.

01:14:09.578 --> 01:14:12.981
But it's certainly worth pondering
another possibility:

01:14:12.981 --> 01:14:17.319
that the reason why so many similarly-oriented early interpretations

01:14:17.319 --> 01:14:20.355
of the School of Athens existed in the first place

01:14:21.156 --> 01:14:24.827
was because its core message is, actually,

01:14:24.827 --> 01:14:32.267
how a panoply of divinely-inspired ancient
philosophical traditions impact Christian theological understanding—

01:14:32.267 --> 01:14:35.737
a notion which not only resonated strongly within

01:14:35.737 --> 01:14:39.708
contemporary Renaissance humanist circles,
as we've seen,

01:14:39.708 --> 01:14:46.748
but particularly, and most significantly,
throughout the Stanza della Segnatura itself.

01:14:47.783 --> 01:14:51.520
Which is all to say that
when you reach for a modern commentary

01:14:51.520 --> 01:14:56.325
on a famous masterpiece like the School
of Athens, it's vital to remember that

01:14:56.325 --> 01:15:00.929
the interpretation you'll be presented
with will likely be strongly coloured

01:15:00.929 --> 01:15:04.333
by the values of those who developed it
centuries later.

01:15:05.334 --> 01:15:10.906
If you really want to understand what
Raphael and his patrons were focused on, in other words,

01:15:10.906 --> 01:15:14.443
there's no substitute for looking as deeply and carefully as possible

01:15:14.443 --> 01:15:21.016
at what he actually created
in order to come to your own conclusions.

01:15:21.016 --> 01:15:23.952
Which is surely what he would have wanted.