PJ's Studio: School of Athens

Sunday, June 28, 2026

School of Athens

As I mentioned in a previous blog, I believe that “School of Athens” in the Vatican City is Raphael’s finest work. He painted it in 1509-1511. It is part of the Stanze di Raffaello in the Apostolic Palace.

Most of the attention paid to the work focuses on the figures represented – said to be every great Greek philosopher, although not all have been identified. Hence a guessing game that has lasted for centuries.

The key figures are Plato on the left – holding his book “Timaeus” and Aristotle on the right holding his book “Ethics.” As was the fashion of the day, real people were used to represent historic figures – Plato is based on Leonardo da Vinci.

We can recognize Pythagoras by his harmonic scale. Telauges is on his right. But we don’t know if that’s Anaximander or Boethius on his left.

Raphael included himself – in the black hat second from the right facing us, mixing with Ptolemy whose back is to us and either Zoroaster or Seleucus on his left.

The lone woman included in the painting is Hypatia of Alexandria who was a renowned Neoplatonist philosopher, astronomer and mathematician in 4^th century Egypt.

Socrates (on the right) praised her as a brilliant philosopher and condemned her tragic murder during Lent 415 CE by a Christian mob who dragged her into a church, stripped her and brutally murdered her.

Perhaps my favorite story about the mural is that Raphael was painting it at the same time that Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel. After sneaking a peak at his work, Raphael was so impressed by what he saw, that he decided to add Michelangelo to the painting.

While it’s fun to play “guess who,” what makes this painting so extraordinary is its flawless one-point linear perspective. While other Renaissance artists were also making strides in their use of a single vanishing point, most of their paintings tend to just have a background and a foreground.

But Raphael creates multiple middle layers too giving the piece an incredible sense of depth. If you stand in front of the painting as I was when I took this photo, you feel like you can just walk right into it. That’s how realistic the sense of three-dimensional space is.