In Our Time - The School of Athens

Episode Date: March 26, 2009

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss The School of Athens – the fresco painted by the Italian Renaissance painter, Raphael, for Pope Julius II’s private library in the Vatican. The fresco depicts some of the most famous philosophers of ancient times, including Aristotle and Plato, engaged in discussion amidst the splendour of a classical Renaissance chamber. It is considered to be one of the greatest images in Western art not only because of Raphael’s skill as a painter, but also his ability to have created an enduring image that continues to inspire philosophical debate today. Raphael captured something essential about the philosophies of these two men, but he also revealed much about his own time. That such a pagan pair could be found beside a Pope in private tells of the complexity of intellectual life at the time when classical learning was reborn in what we now call the Renaissance.With Angie Hobbs, Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Warwick; Valery Rees, Renaissance scholar and senior member of the Language Department at the School of Economic Science; Jill Kraye, Professor of the History of Renaissance Philosophy and Librarian at the Warburg Institute at the University of London

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, despite the not unimpressive feat of commissioning the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Pope Julius II is better known as a warrior than a scholar. But when you did put down the sword and pick up a book, he would have done so under a magnificent, if slightly unexpected fresco.

It's called The School of Athens. It was painted by Raphael in about 1509, and it sits in a room in the Vatican that housed Julius's private library. The School of Athens depicts an imaginary scene in which philosophers of several eras are gathered together, at the centrist and Plato and Aristotle in discussion. Plato is pointing at the sky and Aristotle at the ground. In that pairing of gestures, Raphael captured something essential

about the philosophers of these two men, but he also revealed much about his own time, that such a pagan pair could be found beside a Pope in private, tells of the complexity of intellectuals, life in the period in which classical learning was reborn in what we now call the Renaissance. With me to discuss the School of Athens of Valerie Reese, Renaissance scholar and senior member of the Language Department at the School of Economic Science, Jewel Cray, Professor of History of Renaissance Philosophy and Librarian at the Warburg Institute at the University of London, and Angie Hobbes,

Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Warwick. Angie Hobbes, can you describe the painting for us? Well, we're invited in to this sumptuously vaulted classical interior The architecture is Roman, not Greek, and I'm sure we'll be coming back to that, and the eye is led to this triumphal style arch at the far end, leading to blue sky beyond. And then beautifully orchestrated around this interior, we have mainly groups of largely Greek philosophers and intellectuals, standing, sitting, discussing with each other, some listening. Plato and Aristotle, as you've mentioned, we also have Socrates, Epicure, Hippacia. There are a couple of lone figures. We've got Heraclitus brooding and solitary splendor.

And we've also got Diogenes, the cynic, who loved flouting convention. And he's sort of loosely sprawling on the steps with his robes in a state of disarray. So we have this wonderful, sort of vibrant, vivid intellectual scene. And I'm looking at a rather poor print of it, I'm afraid, at the moment. And the only men, and they're all men, are in the bottom, almost the bottom third. So the thing is a vast edifice, really. It's the edifice. The place itself is very, very important, isn't it? The vaults, the three arches, the great statues,

which are bigger than any of the philosophers. So can you describe, can you give us a view as to why I think Raphael put so much effort into the space, the place? Yes, we've got, well, we've got all these Roman echoes, as I've said, we've got echoes of the bar, of Di Clesian, we've got echoes of the Pantheon, there's a statue of Apollo and Athena in her Roman guise as Minerva. Now, it's going to be an interesting question, I'm sure we'll

all have views on, about whether Raphael is deliberately romanising this Greek space to flatter his papal sponsors and his audience and to place current Italian intellectual life in this setting, or whether, in fact, he doesn't even really know about the different. between Greek and Roman architectural styles, because not a lot of people did know a great deal about Greek architecture at the time. So it may be that he just is painting what he thinks as a sort of general antique style.

And of course, everything's leading you up, and we're led up to this, as I said, this arch at the back and the blue sky beyond, which, of course, is going to be so significant in terms of where Plato and Aristotle are gesturing. Is this place anything that might have been designed? at the time in Rome, in Florence, around Italy as a palace or as a meeting place. I'm trying to fix it as a place.

Did Raphael just said, I'll build the grandest place I can think of and here goes? I think so. I mean, it's very fantastical. Echoes of the grandest buildings in Rome that he knew about. I don't know exactly when the Golden House of Nero was discovered. I know it was in Raphael's lifetime, so he may be gesturing to that. Also, there are a lot of references to famous paintings of the period and beforehand. So this is a fantastical, rhetorical, sumptuous space.

He wants to gather the cream of intellectual thought, not just pagan thought. We also, in a Christian setting, there's also the Muslim scholar of Eweroese. There may be the Zoroastra. Maybe there are two founder of Zoroastrianism. So he's putting all these intellectuals into this. glorious space. Now this is a rhetorical fantasy. Alarise, would it be fair to say this painting encapsulates the Renaissance view of the history of philosophy? Well, certainly it's drawing on what had been going on in the past couple of generations, starting in Florence,

where there was an attempt to bring the whole of philosophic endeavour from the past to the service of the present. and the idea that all that's important philosophically can be traced back to the classical world and can be explored there in new depth in ways that were vibrant for the present. And it was important that they had brought into play so many classical philosophers who had been forgotten in the intervening centuries. And their texts had been rediscovered and translated and made to look. again. And there was a view developed mainly by Ficino that really brought not just the Greeks into the fold, but also the Chaldeans and the Egyptians, and the idea that the whole of

humankind really belonged to one sweep of religious and philosophic endeavour. And that's the scene that Raphael is trying to convey. With about 58 philosophers there are all in Togos, there's this phrase, the golden thread. Can you tell to the golden thread and take us to the center of the laboratory? Ficino certainly developed the idea that there was a chain of philosophical transmission. And the earliest that he could locate it was with Zoroaster, the Chaldean, who was before the time of Abraham. And whatever teaching it was that he received. from divine sources, this somehow passed to the Egyptians,

and from the Egyptians to Orpheus in Thrace, who then inspired the Greek philosophic tradition with Aglauphemus and Socrates and Plato. And he changes who's in his list of important philosophers from time to time, so that he always ends up with a list of six important stages. and I suppose behind that there is the, first of all, six is a perfect number, but in the Christian context, the six lead naturally to the seventh, and all these find their fulfilment in Christ.

This is his idea that you can follow the development of religious and philosophical thought twined together, and it comes to its fulfilment in Christianity. Just to bring to the fore the obvious, which we must do, This is a time when the classical texts are being rediscovered, re-translated. There's a great Arabic translation period of the 9th and 10th century. Then it comes into Arabic from Syriac. Then it's translated into Latin in the 11th century.

Of all of Constantinople, brings straight Greek texts in. So a lot of retranslation of text. And classical learners entered and has been allowed to enter Europe again. Can you tell us that the effect, how big that movement was? Well, that movement really gathered pace, as you say, with the arrival of Greek texts after the fall of Constantinople, but there had already been a lot of interest. And the interest begins to intensify early in the 15th century when Ambrosio Traversari translates the lives of the philosophers. And people begin to think about these philosophers in a different way.

And that opens the door to a lot of re-eshoe. translation of Plato and then finally the arrival after 1453, the arrival in the 1460s of a complete set of the works of Plato which had not been known in the Latin West. It does show us that a change in culture.

The Emperor brings as a present the complete set of the works of Plato to the Pope. I don't know what you would take nowadays it would be a remote equivalence. I can't, I dare and think of what heads of state give to each other

but the complete works of play. And then the next best thing is the Pope gets hold of the best man at hand to translate the whole lot. Now that's a present, isn't it? Well, yes, it's hard to think what would be the equivalent now. It is impossible to discover one. Don't. It was a gift that opened up so many new perspectives on things,

and that gave a freshness to philosophic discussion. Jill Craig, can you tell us something about the setting up of the fresco? The frescoes, there were four of them, the school of philosophy, later called the School of Athens, sorry, not called the School of Athens at the time, no four of those were a law one. So what was its purpose? Why did Julius want to have these in what we think was,

certainly it was the central of the Vatican, his private library? There was a tradition in libraries to divide them according to subject, and to have the decoration follow the subject classification. And we know what was in Julius's private library because we have an inventory, he had about 220 books, and they were divided between theology, philosophy, law, and poetry. And each of the frescoes reflects one of those subject classifications, and we think the books were probably in bookshelves beneath the frescoes.

And on top of each fresco, in the ceiling, there's a medallion which has an allegory of that particular disson. So the allegory of philosophy has lady philosophy, and she has two books, one called natural and one called moral, and standing for natural and moral philosophy. And then in the fresco below, the school of Athens, we have Plato holding the Temaeus, which is about natural philosophy, as it was believed in the Renaissance, and Aristotle holding the ethics. So it's an integrated scheme. And I think the important thing is that the image opposite philosophy was theology, and there are a lot of compositional similarities and dissimilarities. They play off each other. I think that was very important in terms of the scheme of the library, given that this was in the Vatican. And so I think Julius wanted a place to hold his library that also reflected the range of books in it. So the philosophy is what we're concentrating on, and there's the most striking in a way.

You can understand him doing theology, of course. You can even understand him doing law, because that would include canon law, and just about poetry, although Pindar and people come into that, but even so philosophy, he's bringing classical and pagan scholars into the Vatican. Not many centuries before, the great Library of Alexandria had been sacked or depleted because it contained by Christians,

because it contained works by classical and pagan scholars. Now there's been enough time for a change, but nevertheless, there has been a massive change. So what was, what ambiance did Julius find himself in that gave him the impulse and the right, as it were, to do that? In the first place, I think one thing that's worth mentioning is Julius had very few philosophical books in his library, only a handful. Most of it was theology and law.

He studied canon law. I think one can get a feeling for this. There was a sermon delivered on the 1st of January 1508 in the Vatican, and Raphael started painting the frescoes later in that year. and it's addressed at the end of this sermon. It was the Feast of the Circumcision. The humanist who gave the sermon speaks of the culture of Greece, the culture of Athens. He refers to the Lyceum, the Atheneum.

And he says, after the fall of Constantinople, which Valerie mentioned, the Vatican Library becomes the refuge of Greek learning. And the Vatican Library, not Julius's private library, but the main library was founded by Julius's uncle, Pope Sixtus the Fourth. And he refers to the Vatican Library as the very image of the academy. And he says, now that the Byzantine Empire is gone, we have to protect Greek culture, and the place to protect it is in Rome, in the Vatican.

It becomes the refuge of Greek learning. It's still something to puzzle over for another moment to do, isn't it? We have this fierce church, fierce, proselyt, church, which has the one true faith and has had for many centuries and has guarded it and has proselytized for it and has fought for it. And their enemy has been for a long time, paganism, classical learning. In it comes, in full pomp and glory, one of the greatest artists of the day. There we have, the 58 philosophers. Now, it's quite a turn-up. Well, as I was sort of indicating before, you have to look at the room as a totality.

and particularly the relationship between the wall of philosophy, the School of Athens, and the other wall, which is theology. Now, the medallion on top of the philosophy has a little Latin motto, which is the understanding of causes. It sort of plays on a line from Virgil's Aeneid. But the motto on top of theology is the knowledge of divine things. And I think what we're meant to see in this room, as the two frescoes play off each other,

is that philosophy begins this pursuit for the understanding of causes, which reaches its culmination in the knowledge of divine things which you learn through theology. And the great Renaissance philosopher Giovanni Picco della Miranda,

Marandala, who may actually be in this fresco. Some people think the beautiful young boy in a white robe has his features. It does look a bit like him. He wrote, the truth is sought by philosophy, found by theology,

and possessed by religion. And I think that's the kind of message we're getting from this room. And the art historian, Ernst Kahnbrick, once when he was writing about this, said it's not about profaning the sacred, it's about sanctifying the profane. And I think that's what's going on there. And Je Hobbes, it still does, thank you very much, John. It still does give us a sense of a very free, very open intellectual society there, which is for the first time, for nearly one and a half millennia that we're talking about it. And at the centre of that, we have Plato and Aristotle, in apparent disagreement.

Now, what was Raphael getting at by having Plato appearing to point at the heavens, the sky? What he's getting at is the fact that Plato thinks that this world is only a semi-real, a strange metaphysical category, a semi-real image or imitation of the realm of the realm of the divine, eternal, unchanging, immaterial forms, the perfect, absolute forms of the good and the beautiful and so on. And that's where reality truly lies. Not necessarily literally in the heavens again, that's a rhetorical gesture. What's interesting about this is that Plato's holding the Temaeus. Now, the Tameus is fascinating because, yes, it discusses the forms and it discusses God as a divine

craftsman. But it's also of all Plato's works, the one which most discusses this phenomenal world of change in time and space. How much Raphael knew about that is intriguing. So

Plato does think reality lies elsewhere, but he doesn't leave it at that. He's all his life. He's fascinated by how we can best try to imitate that perfect reality in the material of this changing imperfect world. So there's the ideal world of which we are a shabby little representation.

We are a shabby representation, but we can try and become better. He says in more than one dialogue the aim is to try to become like God, to try and imitate the divine. And behind our imperfect forms are perfect forms and so on. So there's perfection out there. There is perfection, yes. And we fall far short of it, but we, we. may try to, must try to, we must aspire to it and then perhaps we will rejoin it in some way,

although we won't know we've rejoined it. Well, after death, because Plato believes in a form of afterlife, not for our whole soul, but for the rational part of our soul. After death, the rational part of our soul in its disembodied state will regain its existence with the forms. But again, that's not personal immortality, no. No, it isn't. But don't. Do you know, it doesn't? is a distinction here with Aristotle who's gesturing at the ground and this opposition is

obviously very well marked by Raphael. What is he, as it were, saying in this brilliant dumb show by gesturing at the ground? Well, there was a tradition goes back at least to the 13th century and we have some texts

from St. Bonaventure which discusses the idea that Plato was interested in wisdom, whereas Aristotle was interested in knowledge, and that Plato mainly looked upwards towards higher things and Aristotle downwards towards lower things. And I think this idea, which became a topos, is partly in this gesture. Another way one might interpret it is that the Temaeus, as Angie said, is about the cosmos, it's about nature, and we know the division of philosophy is between

natural and moral philosophy from the medallion on top. Whereas Arirond, Aristotle's holding the ethics, which is about our life here on earth, our activities, our concerns in an earthly realm. Can I come to you, Valerie, and let's just develop this a little more, because using these two books, the Timaeus that Angie has talked about and the ethics that John's referred to, they are represented as being very different things. Can we talk about the idea of God in book 10 of the ethics and the idea of the ethics and the idea God as represented and thought of by Plato.

Let's just use that as a starting point. I think in a way we need to recognize that we're looking at both of those books interpreted. So Aristotle had been brought into the Christian tradition in the 13th century. Aristotelian philosophy had been digested and aligned with Christianity, except there were some problems in that. And the result of those problems was that by the 15th century there was beginning to be a breakdown between intellectual endeavour and piety,

that the philosophers could no longer believe in religion because following Aristotelian methods and Aristotelian texts, they were arriving at conclusions that weren't only longer in agreement with Christianity. And then along comes the idea, of Plato. And in Plato's texts, there was an idea about the divine that was far closer to a Christian interpretation of God. And this doesn't directly answer your question about God in Aristotle's

10th book, and I hope maybe Angie or Jill can take that further. But there is a lovely quotation from Ficino when he is most trying to show the convergence of Christianity and Platonism, where he describes the Temeus as, if you get interested in these things, he's talking to a new student, then all these dialogues as people will come rushing to meet you, and he says of the Temaeus that Temeus will show you that the universe has been created by God through the grace of his goodness, and he, Plato, or Timaeus, will show that God created heaven and earth

and poured out his airy spirit on the waters and that these will endure and so on. So he's giving a very Christian description of what is going on in the first part of the Timas when Plato is talking about the creation of the world. So it's a platonic idea of God that has been brought right into the Christian fold by the time Raphael's painting.

Yes. Plato was trained as a mathematician. It's curious, isn't it? while you were talking, I was thinking, we're talking now Plato in terms of God, and yet he's come down to the West as being the almost the initiator of logic, which does seem to be, in many people's views, a long way from anything to do

with the divine. That's maybe even another program. We might get back. Andrew Hobbs, let's keep talking about these two men. Plato trained as a mathematician, Aristotle trained as what we're natural scientist, biologist, his father was the doctor to Alexander

the great he himself, is a tutor, of Alexander Great. He was a stranger in Athens. The difference between the mathematician and the biologist, does that help us to say more about these pointing to Earth and pointing to the sky? Yes, it does because Plato

thinks that the perfect circle, the perfect square, is going to be the ideal sort of halfway house to lead us away from the phenomenal objects of this sensible world towards the perfect absolute forms. And of course, in a world

in Plato's world where there weren't factories and you wouldn't have seen perfect circles or squares very often they would have always been a representation and the mathematician would have had to have known that that's what you were talking about. One is the academies. Don't enter my academy if you don't know mathematics. That's right. If you have not studied geometry, yes. No, it's a geometry, that's it.

Absolutely wonderful. Well, yes, it's also a good way of getting the political assassins off his back just to make you think that you're the madman at the end of the pier. Aristotle, yes, studied biology in some depth when he was in his one or, he was in exile more than once and studied all sorts of crustacea and so on in the Aegean in great closeness. Yes, and that does perhaps link in with his view that this world is more to be trusted, that reality is not elsewhere.

For Aristotle, the forms are tied up with matter in this way. world. The objects that we see around us, tables, chairs, you and me, we all exist for Aristotle. We're just combinations of matter and form, and the forms aren't separate. But there's one really, really interesting point, which comes back to things that both Jill and Valerie were saying. Aristotle, as we've noted, is holding the Nekomachian ethics. And as Jill rightly says, nearly all of that is about how to be the best possible human you can in a political and social context. However, in the last book of the Nekomachian ethics. Aristotle says, in fact, the most divine part of us is our rational part, which is able to contemplate the divine. And in fact, the happiest life, the

most flourishing life, is the life devoted to contemplation of the divine. And Aristotle says very explicitly, those are wrong, he says, and he means, he's quoting Pinder here, the lyric poet. He says, those are wrong who say that mortals should think only mortal thoughts. We shouldn't think only mortal thoughts. And what he's alluding to there is a debate that runs throughout Greek literature about whether humans should try to become like God or whether that is hubristic and arrogant and we should stick to our human mortal sphere. And on that respect, Aristotle agrees with Plato. We should, as far as we can, try to become like God. So though Raphael, for the purposes of visual clarity, has got this very arresting image where they seem to be, in

disagreement holding up these two books. In fact, those two books have a little bit more in common than Raphael's visual trope suggests. So I understand it, Jill. Aristotle's idea of God was that there was a God, or he used that word or a word like God. You'll tell me which word he did use, which was a force of thought, a form out there, but had no interest in human beings. and therefore why should he Aristotle be interested in God? Now that is a big difference and a point of view that's often slightly by me anyway. What do you think of that? Well, I think people feel that the kind of God who comes up in book 10 in ethics

is rather different from the God you're talking about thinking thought, which is in the metaphysics. And it seems to be that when he's talking in the context of ethical thought, he refers to a God that you can imitate and that you can think about. And in the metaphysics, he refers to God in a more abstract idea. And sometimes he refers to the gods.

He says the man who is a contemplative man is loved by the gods. He uses the plural. But in the metaphysics, he refers to a singular god. So I think there's an inconsistency there. And I don't think, by the way, that Raphael would have really known anything about either of these books. Exactly. That's not going to be. In a way, this is a little bit of a red herring.

What he would have known is the tradition of Plato as being interested in wisdom and interested in higher things and Aristotle being interested in the earth. He wasn't an intellectual, he was a painter. He was very keen on ancient art, but he wouldn't have been reading these books. There would have been people around who did read the books. By the way, of the very small number of books that Julius had in his library,

he had the ethics and the politics of Aristotle. Can I come to you for a moment, Mary. We're talking about, mention Aristotle. Aristotle has been the dominating Greek. He's been the philosopher. People didn't mean to say Aristotle, the philosopher. And the way Aquinas took him on and felt he had to, after Arboros, the Arab said, great Arab scholars, we have to take him on.

Then Aquinas took him on and somehow I have to absorb this man into Christian philosophy and Christian theology because he's so important. He was the great dominating force. when we had this great gift, let's use this just as a, from the collected Plato in Greek from from Constantinope, which came across.

Ficino, you mentioned several times, and Ficino did the translations of them, translated all of Plato, and became the great propagandist for Plato and brought Plato into the scene in a very strong way. Can you tell us how effective and how he did that, how effective that was?

Well, he did it first of all by personal conviction, he became enchanted with Platonic philosophy as a student. And then he was asked to go away and learn Greek so that he could translate properly because Plato had come down in a very veiled form through the Middle Ages. So he then starts translating dialogues of Plato for Cosimo de Medici. And no translator's job is complete then as now until they've done a summary of what contains and started to explain the difficult points in it with a commentary. So he embarked on this in a small way and it just grew until he had translated all of those

and continued to revise them and continued to read all these new works that were coming through from the East in Greek that people hadn't studied before. He read Plotinus, he read Proclos, he read all the commentators of the Eastern tradition where platonic texts had still been available, although somewhat neglected. And out of this came the real understanding that infused him, and he, in his lectures and his discussions and his letters and his commentaries, began to infuse everybody else. But Plato didn't quite supplant Aristotle, even though he seems a much closer fit to Christianity than Aristotle ever was. Is that right, Andrew? Well, there's been a long tradition of

Christian scholars and men of religion trying to fit all sorts of pagan philosophers into a Christian framework. So you've got Augustine who appropriates Plato. There's a quietest appropriating Aristotle. So that that's gone on at the same time. There have also been plenty of Christian writers and thinkers who have attacked both Plato and Aristotle as being impious. So there's a tradition of saying that, of attacking Plato,

I think Trebizond was by no means a Plato fan. You know, Plato has been attacked for being a paedophile, for believing in reincarnation, which was regarded as heresy, for believing in the community of wives in the Republic. Aristotle has been attacked for not believing in a personal, immortal soul. So there's been a huge debate. So there's been no agreement right from the beginning of Christianity. There have been great fans of both Plato and Aristotle,

but also people pretty hostile. Yes, there were people who believed that the closer philosophy came to Christianity, the more dangerous it was, not the less dangerous it was. And Pico della Miranda's nephew was one of those, and he was very much alive and promulgating this view at the time that Raphael was painting his fresco. But it's also true that Ficino had to work very hard to do. deal with the aspects of Plato that came under criticism. For instance, his apparent belief in reincarnation

and the accusations of being a paedophile. These were things that he really devoted a great deal of time and attention to finding a way through, a way of understanding it, that was not in any conflict with his beliefs. And out of this came the idea of platonic love. Joe Cray, you said earlier it's very unlikely that Raphael had read these books, Dimeyes, On the other hand, we are talking about a presence there in this library in the Vatican

and from what you've all been saying, there seems to be a swirl of ideas. Are we looking back on that through the rose-tinted, or are we talking about a time when classical ideas were being debated, were, if not challenging or contesting, at least being talked about alongside the Christian theological ideas? Are those sort of debates going on? Yes, they're going on, as Angie said, continuously throughout the Christian tradition. but they continue and perhaps even increased during the Renaissance.

There was something that we now call the Plato-Aristotle controversy, and Angie mentioned George of Trebizond, who attacked Plato, and then other people defended Plato, Cardinal Bizarrian, another Byzantine wrote a book called Against the Slanderer of Plato, where he defended Plato's similarity to Christianity. And these issues continue being debated in the 15th and the 16th century. But I think we need to keep this in perspective because there were people whom Ficino got interested in Plato. But he was still very much the Johnny Come Lately, the new kid on the block.

Aristotle had been the center of philosophical discourse since the 13th century, and he remained the center until the 17th century. And if you want to play the numbers game, in the 15th century, there were 10 editions of Plato, and there were almost 200 of Aristotle, not to mention the commentators. In the 16th century, we have maybe a few hundred editions of Plato. We have a few thousand of Aristotle. Everyone who went to university and studied philosophy,

every educated person would have read Aristotle. So although Plato is new and exciting and brings a new dimension, he doesn't come anywhere near displacing Aristotle. And when Aristotle is displaced and challenged, it's in the 17th century, and then it's Descartes and Hobbes, Bacon and Galileo, not Plato. which absolutely and that makes Raphael's fresco all the more interesting because the central image as you said we've got Plato and Aristotle

on the same height of step right in the centre Equal height I'm looking down now absolutely and they are roughly of the same height they seem to be of equal status they're dressed differently Plato has no shoes perhaps in a base of Stocrates who famously went on the show at an Aristotle who was known to be a very natty dresser he's very elegantly attired but they do seem to be given the same status, literally the same height,

in the centre of the fresco. So I think that makes what Raphael or what Raphael's sponsors wanted, his commissioners wanted, all the more interesting. Because all these debates about whether Plato or Aristotle, who was better, was one impious or immoral or not, that's left out of this fresco. And we've got this harmony between pagan philosophy and Christianity. And also, as we've seen, we've got...

Islam represented by Averroes, we may have Zoroastrianism, we do seem to have this harmony of the world, which I think is really important for the rhetoric of the painting. Sorry, the fresco. Valerie. Going back to the fresco, I was very struck by the portrayal of the two figures, and without wanting to undermine in any way what Jill said about the dominance of Aristotle, which I think is true, and even Ficino was also grounded in Aristotelian thought.

I couldn't help noticing that the figure of Socrates has a serenity and a centredness that Aristotle doesn't. Aristotle is beset by all these thoughts he's trying to convey to his teacher Plato. And Plato has this still self-centered appearance in the picture that I think is also part of the rhetoric of what's going on there. Sorry, Angie you were to come in.

And we shouldn't forget, there are plenty of philosophers. and their disciples in the fresco who aren't paying any attention to play to our Aristotle whatsoever. They're off doing their own thing and as we've noted Heraclitus and Diogenes the cynic are having nothing to do with anybody. So it's not at all a static portrait of serene discipleship.

We've got really vigorous debate and disagreement and energy going on here with this beautifully still centre, as Valerie has noted. But it does seem to me to, to be harmonious, the thing is coming together with these two people at the send, and yet we know of the rivalries, intense, often expressed in rather personal terms, rivalries between the philosophers, certainly between their philosophies. What do you make of that, Jill, Jill Croy?

I don't think that's what the fresco is about. I think it's representing the activity of philosophy in antiquity, and I think it is meant to give you a wide range. There's natural philosophy, moral philosophy, there are people who are cynics. there are people who were interested in the mathematics and astronomy. It's meant to give you a full picture, and I don't think that they're getting involved in this controversy

which was fought out in books among intellectuals. This is philosophy. This is where the Pope was going to keep his small number of philosophical books, and it just represents all the things that philosophers did in antiquity without getting involved in these disputes. And there's a woman. We should point out we do have a woman. We have Hippacia from 400 AD, Alexandria, well-known mathematician, astronomer, great interest in philosophy and engineering.

People came to study with her. I mean, I would love my experts, and I decide to tell me how kind of arresting would it have been for people to see a woman very centrally placed in this body of august males? I was just going to say that in one of the other frescoes in the room, the Parnassus, which represents poetry, we have Sappho. Yes, indeed, of course you do. And she's the only person there labelled. So I think this is a very... But would it have been unusual at this time to give women such intellectual status?

Valerie. It's interesting that it's identified as Hypatia, who was indeed an important teacher of philosophy and her student, Sinisius, was one of the... platonic writers that Ficino translated. But the really interesting woman in the philosophical tradition is Diotima

who gave Socrates the teaching on love that came down into the Renaissance with such new vitality that it inspired many of these painters and poets in what they were doing. Can I just, as we're coming to an analogy, can I just try to bring this together

in a sense of, back to a sort of more fundamental bit? We are bringing classical thought into the most sacred, to use Gombrix's word, Christian context. This is done in the spirit of a remarkable age, the Renaissance and so. How long did this last? Was this embrace, this taking on? Was this a small period of time?

Did it go away? Was it smashed by the Protestant Reformation and so on? No, it never goes away. Well, I'm going to stand corrected by the people here. But, I mean, no, for me, it never goes away. It changes form. Plato takes more of a centre stage and becomes more important in the 18th and 19th centuries. But no, the debate about which was the superior, Plato, Aristotle. In fact, the Stoicism takes over it.

By the time we get to the late 16th century and beyond the dominant pagan philosophy in cultured Europe is Stoicism and in its modern forms. and that continues until at least I would have said the end of the 18th century. No, in my view, it never goes away, but I'll be interested to hear. Malaritan then, Jill. I think it becomes harder after the Counter-Reformation, after the Council of Trent, to be very free in talking about ancient philosophies. There is a much greater control over what's said and what's not allowed to be said, and the things that had been generated in the late 15th century

could not have been generated 50 years afterwards. Would you agree with that, Jill? Yes, but I think I'd like to stress that in the 17th century, although people continue to read Plato and Aristotle and indeed the Stoics and to be inspired by them, you're getting a gradual shift away from basing philosophy on antiquity and a new philosophy which starts from first principles. And that gradually becomes the dominant form of philosophy.

People continue to study ancient philosophy, but as the history of philosophy. And in the 18th and 19th century, people are interested in these authors in a more historical sense. The actual activity of philosophy moves in a different direction. So you get a sort of bifurcation of this. In the 19th century, people studied Plato much more historically.

Except even with great philosophers like Kant. And Hegel and Kant, they are still owing a huge amount to the Stoics and Plato and... But it's not really what philosophy is about anymore. You're not writing commentaries. And in the Renaissance, if you wanted to study Plato, you wrote a commentary or Aristotle, you wrote a commentary. There's a new move with Descartes. Finally, Angie, it's difficult to identify these faces.

You've thrown some names around and so on, but it's still difficult. Euclid we think is there. Socrates, we think, is there. You've said to it. And so were there any great Christian philosophers there in the picture? On the other side of the room on the theology? Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, possibly even Svonarola, the great church fathers. They're all on the other side in that way that I've been stressing that the two pictures speak to each other.

And we have a group of theologians. Some we can identify, some we can't, as in the School of Athens. And that's where the theologians are. They are physically literally facing each other. There is this wonderful dialogue. We fill up with poetry and law on the other two walls. Thank you very much, Angie Hobbes, Valerie, Jill Kray. next week,

where's next week. Yes, we'll be discussing Baconian Science. Thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.ukh, forward slash radio 4.