ABSTRACT
At the center of what is arguably the most famous image ever created of classical thought, the Scuola di Atene (The School of Athens), stands two gures that have come to represent dual methods for understanding reality. Raphael’s famous fresco was commissioned by the Vatican as part of a larger installation depicting the branches of human knowledge that would adorn the walls of the Stanza della Segnatura in the Apostolic Palace, which in the early sixteenth century served as Julius II’s personal library. Alongside the other branches of knowledge-theology, poetry, and lawRaphael’s masterpiece shows a gathering of twenty-one Greek and Roman philosophers engaged in conversation, work, and games in an ornate school anked by statues of Apollo and Athena. While the title (which was not Raphael’s) implies a harmonious gathering of scholars working together in the pursuit of knowledge, the pairings of certain thinkers suggest a more complex representation of classical thought, one marked by differing and at times opposing views about reality. For instance, standing fairly close to one another we see Socrates and Epicurus, two thinkers whose conceptions of the soul and its immortality could not have been more opposed. And to the left of Heraclitus, the great pre-Socratic philosopher of change, Raphael has placed Parmenides, the Eleatic who argues that nothing changes and that change itself is merely an illusion (one can only imagine what they are talking about!).
