The World of Myth Magazine

You cannot sum the renaissance up easily. It was a flourishing of artistic and intellectual thought that happened in different places, in different ways, at different times. The English renaissance and the French renaissance were very different from each other, and neither of those were like the Italian renaissance. But when most people are talking about 'the renaissance' in casual conversation they are probably referring to the Italian renaissance – and people like Michelangelo and da Vinci.

This renaissance is first seen in Florence. Because of its proto-capitalist Medici government it had the money to splash out, and finance new ideas. All these different, new ideas eventually settled into a coherent philosophy: Humanism. That is not the secular/atheist Humanism we have come to associate that word with today, but the two are not unrelated either. Renaissance Humanism placed a lot of emphasis on a kind of noble humanity and was very interested in the liberal arts: literature, philosophy, and rhetoric and debate. This Humanism then spread to Venice and then to Rome, and eventually further on – to the lands beyond Italy.

There is always a danger of oversimplification in things like this. Just as it is difficult to say what exactly what caused the renaissance and Humanism to begin. It is probably easiest, here anyway, to say that it started after 1453, when Constantinople was captured by the Turks. Before this conquest, Constantinople had been the capital of the Greek speaking Byzantine Empire. When that empire collapsed Greek speakers fled to Italy, taking with them their books and their language. They soon started teaching and spreading Greek in Italy, which allowed the study of the Ancient Greek philosophers and writers to return to western European thinking – something which had not happened since the fall of the Roman empire, broadly (very broadly) 1,000 years before.

While we have the western monasteries to thank for copying and recopying ancient Latin texts, we must thank first the Byzantine Christians, and then the Muslim world for doing this with the ancient works of Greece. In Bagdad's house of Wisdom, writers like Plato and Aristotle were studied, scrutinized, and commented on – then sent to different parts of the Muslim world. We tend to not realize, too, how much trading there was between Christian and Muslim countries following the Crusades, but it was very common. When knowledge of Greek was rekindled in Italy, Italian nobles like the Medici family had the money, and now the knowledge and incentive, to access a mass of new, ancient learning. For intellectuals, writers and, importantly for us, artists this was a whole new world of inspiration.

We have already discussed the renaissance in these reviews, with Botticelli's Birth of Venus, but no painting summarizes the noble ideals of renaissance thinkers like 1509's The School of Athens by Raphael. Not the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, all of them were named after Renaissance artists for some reason, the guy born in 1483 in Urbino, a city on the Adriatic Sea.

It is noticeable that Western Europe did not have many (hardly any) representations of Ancient Greek thinkers before the 1450s. It becomes much more common and fashionable to have distinctly Greek themes and characters in art after this, during the renaissance period. The School of Athens is one of the most grand and impressive representations of them.

Seemingly everyone who is anyone in a Wikipedia list of great Greek thinkers is here. Or so we might hope. There are some questions of identification here if certain characters can be totally identified with an Ancient Greek antecedent. To show this: where is Socrates in the painting? Why would you think that is Socrates? But there are some characters that have a duel identification. In the center of our view are two central figures and they are, because of the composition of the frame, to whom the viewer first looks. They are the only characters we can identify with any real kind of certainty because they are carrying copies of their own works: they are Plato and Aristotle. Plato is the older, longer-bearded man on the left, and his appearance is modeled on Leonardo da Vinci. There are other characters in the painting who look like Raphael's contemporaries too, and they are fun to spot if you know what renaissance artists looked like.

This would make sense if The School of Athens was intended to suggest that Raphael's contemporary Italy was like the idealized intellectual tradition this painting depicts. In truth, such a 'School of Athens' would never have looked anything like this. Pythagoras, who is thought to be writing into a book in the front left, lived in southern Italy, died before Plato was born, and never set foot in down Athens itself. It is not, and is not intended to be, a depiction of a real place, but a representation of Greek Philosophy, something in tune with the noble, aspirational goals humanity must have for itself.

Aristotle and Plato have been the two great philosophers for much of European history, and so it is only natural that many different readings and interpretations would exist around their works. As such, Raphael's depiction of them is very interesting. Plato, the older man is pointing to the heavens in a very suggestive 'remember the gods' kind of way. Aristotle, by contrast, is the younger man, making a motion like he is grabbing earth. Imagine their debate has something to do with power, Plato seems to be suggesting that the gods are the most important, or in Christian Europe in the 1500s, suggesting that God is the most powerful and important thing, while Aristotle (appearing to hold the ground in place) is saying that earthly matters are more important. This was in fact one of the central debates of the renaissance. In a way, this has been debated up to today – even if the times we live in are much more secular and terrestrially-focused. More 'Humanist,' in a word.

We cannot really know what they are debating, but the debate about where power really lies is one of those important questions in life that are always being asked. There are some questions that are central to the human experience. In a sense, the point of being human is to look for answers to them – even though they are tough, often unanswerable questions. They are the sorts of questions that can leave you wide awake at night questioning the meaning of everything in existence. Thankfully, we have the great philosophers of the past to help us on our way – and their contributions to human thought are as grand and noble as the image Raphael depicted here.