School of Athens

Introduction

In 1508, Pope Julius II called Rafael to the Vatican to do a few painting jobs for him.
Over the next 12-13 years, for Pope Julius II and his successor Pope Leo X, he painted 4 main works being:

The Stanze della Segnatura, later known as Stanze di Raffaello, was in one of Pope Julius II’s rooms in the Papal Apartments
He painted four paintings on each of the four walls
On the smaller walls he painted Parnassus and Cardinal Virtues
On the larger walls he painted Disputa and The School of Athens

The School of Athens is a fresco that heavily portrays humanism and secularism
The painting includes many famous renaissance and pre-renaissance philosophers, thinkers, and artists such as Michelangelo, Pythagoras, Ptolemy, Euclid, and even Rafael
In the center of it all, there was Plato and Aristotle
He didn’t add any religious aspects to it and made all of the people to be human-like
All of these people were people that helped push the ancient world forward into a new, modern world
In the painting, Plato is shown to be pointing to the sky, symbolizing “beyond earth”, or religious beliefs
On the other hand, there is Aristotle, who is shown to be pointing to the ground
He is essentially saying that humans should focus on humans and human principle rather than god, which is essentially humanism and secularism
Around all of this, Rafael included Greco-Roman architecture to add a feeling of peace and sublimity
He uses perspective to make it look three-dimensional and makes the view get smaller and smaller to the point where everything in the distance is just one dot
The main reason that this painting got a lot of attention is that it portrayed such deep meaning in such a beautiful way

Dimensions: 5.79 m x 8.24 m