Raphael Paints the School of Athens

1511

In the Vatican's Stanza della Segnatura, Raphael completed a fresco gathering Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, and Pythagoras beneath a coffered Roman vault. He slipped a brooding portrait of Michelangelo into the foreground as Heraclitus. The School of Athens became the Renaissance's pictorial manifesto. The fresco's gathering of philosophers across centuries expressed the Renaissance belief that all human knowledge could be unified through reason.