Aristotle argued that the very world that Plato thought unreal is the reality that matters most to us. He points upward, gesturing toward perfect, eternal, immaterial, unchanging Reality.Īristotle, carrying his Nicomachean Ethics, points his extended arm in front of him toward the world humans inhabit and know through our senses. Plato carries his Timaeus, one of the many books in which he says the temporal world is always perishing and thus less than fully real. In the painting’s focal center, Raphael shows Plato and Aristotle striding toward the viewer as they argue. Visually, The School of Athens presents philosophy as a large-scale communal enterprise carried on within a vastly larger world. Raphael’s homage to classical philosophy puts humans in their place-central, but dwarfed by the context. For me, the room functions as a compelling visual counterargument to what my Baptist upbringing and academic training had both assumed about the triviality of human imagination and the irreconcilability of Christianity with philosophy. Painted archways link the four frescoes into a visual whole which depicts reason, revelation, and imagination as collaborators-a conviction shared by most educated Christians for millennia. Literature and law face one another on the room’s shorter walls. Its most famous fresco is The School of Athens, which takes up the long wall across from Raphael’s tribute to theology. Now thousands of tourists pass through it, giving Raphael’s frescoes only a passing glance. The room was designed as a papal library where frequenters would read and reflect as their imaginations were saturated with its images. That hunger is no small part of why the Room of the Segnatura struck me forcefully when I first visited the Vatican in my late 40s. Read our latest issue or browse back issues.
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