The School of Athens

Beneath a soaring vault the philosophers of antiquity gather: at the center Plato points upward to the world of ideas and Aristotle levels his hand toward the earth, the two poles of Western thought set in a single stride. Raphael fills the hall with portraits - Plato wears the face of Leonardo; the brooding figure slumped on the steps is Michelangelo, whose Sistine ceiling Raphael had just glimpsed; Euclid bends to his compass with the features of the architect Bramante; and Raphael himself looks out from the far right. Painted for the pope's library, it is the calmest, most spacious statement of the High Renaissance hope that reason and faith, Athens and Rome, might stand in harmony.