DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.51585#0101
RAPHAEL SANZIO d’uHBINO.
97
poets Petrarch, Sappho, Corinna, Pindar, Horace.
The arrangement, grouping, and character are
niost admirable and graceful; but Raphael’s ori-
ginal design for this composition, as we have it
engraved by Marc Antonio, is finer than the fresco,
in which there are many alterations which cannot
be considered as improvements.
Under Philosophy he has placed the School
of Athens. It represents a grand hall or portico,
in which a flight of steps separates the foreground
from the background. Conspicuous, and above
the rest, are the elder intellectual philosophers,
Plato, Aristotle, Socrates; Plato characteristically
pointing upwards to heaven ; Aristotle pointing to
the earth; Socrates impressively discoursing to the
listeners near him.
Then, on a lower plan, we have the Sciences and
Arts, represented by Pythagoras and Archimedes;
Zoroaster, and Ptolemy the geographer; while
alone, as if avoiding and avoided by all, sits Dio-
genes the Cynic. Raphael has represented the art
of painting by the figure of his master Perugino,
and has introduced a portrait of himself humbly
following him. The group of Archimedes (whose
bead is a portrait of Bramante the architect) sur-
rounded by his scholars, who are attentively watch-
ing him as he draws a geometrical figure, is one of
the finest things which Raphael ever conceived,
and the whole composition has in its regularity and
97
poets Petrarch, Sappho, Corinna, Pindar, Horace.
The arrangement, grouping, and character are
niost admirable and graceful; but Raphael’s ori-
ginal design for this composition, as we have it
engraved by Marc Antonio, is finer than the fresco,
in which there are many alterations which cannot
be considered as improvements.
Under Philosophy he has placed the School
of Athens. It represents a grand hall or portico,
in which a flight of steps separates the foreground
from the background. Conspicuous, and above
the rest, are the elder intellectual philosophers,
Plato, Aristotle, Socrates; Plato characteristically
pointing upwards to heaven ; Aristotle pointing to
the earth; Socrates impressively discoursing to the
listeners near him.
Then, on a lower plan, we have the Sciences and
Arts, represented by Pythagoras and Archimedes;
Zoroaster, and Ptolemy the geographer; while
alone, as if avoiding and avoided by all, sits Dio-
genes the Cynic. Raphael has represented the art
of painting by the figure of his master Perugino,
and has introduced a portrait of himself humbly
following him. The group of Archimedes (whose
bead is a portrait of Bramante the architect) sur-
rounded by his scholars, who are attentively watch-
ing him as he draws a geometrical figure, is one of
the finest things which Raphael ever conceived,
and the whole composition has in its regularity and