School of Athens — Raphael
We enter one of the great Renaissance paintings and a tribute to the classical legacy.
Can you imagine being able to spend an afternoon with the most privileged minds of antiquity?
Well, the artist Raphael made it possible with his artistic genius.
Considered a masterpiece of perspective, School of Athens symbolizes, like no other work, the spirit and ideals that shaped the Renaissance: the recovery of the Greek classics.
It is a fresco of enormous dimensions in which the most select of Philosophy and other ancient free arts such as Grammar, Arithmetic, Music, Geometry, Astronomy, Rhetoric, and Dialectic appear. All these figures, dynamic and conversing, thinking, discussing… are an active mass that contrasts with the coldness and architectural stillness, forming a whole that seems to be made of two planes.
There are so many important figures in the history of thought that the whole of Ancient Greece is represented. We could say that it is like an illustrated history book.
A book that we see beginning with Plato and Aristotle, the two great philosophers of antiquity.
