Raphael’s ‘School of Athens’: A Matter of Perspective

Every old world is new to someone

By Raphael — Stitched together from vatican.va, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4406048

“At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet.”
— Symposium (196e), Plato

Did I even notice, the first time around?

Probably not. I was stomping through Rome in cheap, badly fitted shoes full of blood and blisters. I was eighteen years old, a thousand miles from home, and alone in a way I had never been before.

You get a taste for it. I got a taste for a lot of things on that trip. Foreign beer and solitude and Italy itself, a so-far lifelong obsession with the country that started then and slept uneasily for years afterwards before reawakening.

And art.

I had barely been to an art gallery before. Maybe a visit to the sad displays in my local museum, on a school trip where we got shown the minor art of the nearby dead, missing the point of the whole thing, if there was any to miss.

I wasn’t raised like that. I don’t want to toss the term Philistines around; my father believed in books, even if he didn’t read that many. But any appreciation of art is tempered by the fear of pretension. Not of having ideas above my station, exactly; my father taught me to believe that nothing was above my station. But the fear that too much abstraction doesn’t…