Raphael, one of the great Italian
painters of the High Renaissance, painted many of his works for the Vatican. One of
these paintings is The School of Athens,
which he painted in one of the rooms in the Vatican Palace called the Stanza della segnatura (Room of the
Signatura), now known as one of the four “Raphael Rooms”.
This painting depicts a large group
of ancient Greek philosophers gathered in a decorated hall. Plato and Aristotle
stand together in the middle of the painting; Socrates is to the left gesturing
with his hands and wearing a green garment; Pythagoras is sitting at the bottom
left and writing in a big book; Heraclitus is sitting in the bottom middle and
resting his head on his hand; Euclid or Archimedes is bending over and drawing
a geometrical shape on a slate at the bottom right; and right next to him is a
man holding a globe in his hand who perhaps is Ptolemy.
Raphael did not specifically say who
each man in the painting is, so scholars have done their best to identify them
based on their depictions in the painting. The men named above, except perhaps
Heraclitus, are ones that have been more or less certainly identified.
