The Birth of the Past

Part Three. Renaissance

KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK Part Three KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK Renaissance What is all history but praise of Rome? —Francesco Petrarca, Against a Detractor of Italy Every example is lame. —Michel de Montaigne, Essays 138 The Living Past A n icon of High Renaissance art, Raphael’s School of Athens adorns a room in the Vatican’s papal apartments, the Stanza della Segnatura, or “Room of the Segnatura,” so named for the papal tribunal that originally met there. By the time Raphael began decorating this room around 1508, it was intended to house Pope Julius II’s library and serve as his personal study. The pope commissioned from Raphael four frescoes that together would illustrate the general theme of wisdom as the union of truth, beauty, and goodness. Raphael reserved the two largest walls for the depiction of sacred and secular truth. His first effort, the Disputation of the Holy Spirit, symbolizes sacred truth in the church’s marriage of heaven and earth. Directly opposite it stands his second effort, the School of Athens, which portrays secular truth as a gathering of great philosophers. Along the side walls he placed Mount Parnassus (embodying beauty in the form of the muses and poets clustered around Apollo) and The Cardinal and Theological Virtues (representing goodness). Although the young Raphael conceived of this quartet (and its complement of ceiling frescoes ) as a thematic whole, he gained artistic confidence as he worked, manifesting his full genius in the School of Athens (see illustration on cover). In Leonard Barkan’s succinct judgment this fresco presents “the quintessential image of the chronological encounter between Renaissance and antiquity.”1 A monument to Renaissance humanism and its rediscovery of the classical past, the School of Athens depicts the great ancient philosophers in a manner we may describe as “historically correct,” with each figure suitably clothed, standing in the proper company, and bearing the book or instrument that best characterizes his work. At the very center, framing a vanishing point that recedes between them through a succession of arches, stand Plato and Aristotle, the teacher bearing a copy of his Timaeus and pointing upward toward the eternal Ideas that inform the corporeal world, the pupil holding his Ethics and gesturing outward toward the corporeal world from which all knowledge derives. To either side of Renaissance 139 these contrasting figures, others stand or sit in various circles, each cluster intent on its own discussion. Only two figures remain apart. One, traditionally identified as Diogenes—the Cynic who disdained social convention and material wealth—lies alone in a scant robe, sprawling indecorously in the middle ground; the other, gloomy Heraclitus, sits in the foreground, brooding in downcast thought. The painting gathers all these figures together in an idealized Athenian stoa that both symbolizes the space of classical discourse and encompasses the collective wisdom of the ancients. Upon reflection, though, one may consider the setting a bit incongruous. Raphael arrays his sages on steps that rise toward a succession of massive arches, two of which uphold between them an airy dome, whose pillared window frames a bit of cloud floating in the blue sky. This would-be stoa owes more to the soaring vision of Bramante—recalling his plan for the reconstruction of St. Peter’s— than to a classical Athenian portico. Indeed, one of the clustered figures in the right foreground—whether Euclid or Archimedes—bears Bramante’s likeness. And Heraclitus bears Michelangelo’s, Plato Leonardo’s, Apelles Raphael’s (staring straight out at us)—with the host of other presumed and possible transpositions having spawned a small scholarly industry. Tributes to contemporaries are, of course, commonplace in Renaissance painting—where patrons in particular often end up commemorated in the works they sponsor—but Raphael’s transpositions serve to elevate himself and his fellow artists to the status of philosophers and sages. In so doing, he evokes an ideal community that transcends temporal and geographical limits. In the circle to the left of Heraclitus/ Michelangelo, a turbaned Averroës stands near the shoulder of Pythagoras, despite the thousand plus years—and thousand plus miles—that separate the medieval Spanish Arabian from the (presumed) pre-Socratic Greek. And beside Apelles/Raphael stand Zoroaster and Ptolemy—three figures (or maybe we should say four) separated by a considerable expanse of time...