Raphael’s School of Athens: The Medium and the Message – What Does it All Mean? The Painting and its Subject

In Week 1 of the Rome Bookclub series on Raphael’s School of Athens, Professor David Mayernick, Associate Professor in the School of Architecture was joined by Professor Ingrid Rowland. The professors introduced the listeners to Raphael as a person, an artist, and a thinker. They answered the questions: What did he know, and when did he know it? How did he grow as an artist outside the usual studio system? Was he an intellectual as well as an artist?

Rowland started the conversation by speaking about two individuals that Raphael was likely influenced by. The first individual was Egidio da Viterbo, a popular preacher. Rowland said, “[Rafaello’s] lucky to be in the company of two of the greatest explainers of his era- one of them is named Egidio da Viterbo[…] he was famous as a preacher and what he did was try to bring the ideas of Plato into play with normal people. He’s probably in situations where he can talk to Raphael one-on-one. So some of what rafael is getting is from this man who was really the most influential theologian of his day and the most popular preacher.” The second man was Tommaso Inghirami, “ the greatest actor of renaissance Rome”. Rowland remarked that “Raphael could ask him about things and [he wasn’t going to get] just some boring disquisition”. Rowland and Mayernick agreed that it is most likely that these two individuals were incredible sources of knowledge for Raphael. Mayernick then posed the question “how much did raphael bring to the conversation? Was he just the receptor or did he have anything to offer? we don’t really know. but when somebody paints something as influential and successful and sophisticated as what he painted, i think he’s more than just a brush, he has to bring something- it’s not his capacity to dig deep into those things, but to synthesize. He makes things easily understood by others”. Rowland replied that while Raphael most likely was very intellectual himself, he was also probably a very good listener and receptor of information. She went on to say that “I think one of the reasons people thought he was so charming was that he was a good listener. You never really hear about what he was like, you hear that he was gentile and charming and with the giant egos of the renaissance i suspect that meant that he just sat quietly and just took it all in and processed it”. In closing, Mayernick drew a parallel between Raphael’s ability to listen and the figures he depicted as listeners in his paintings, saying “painting is a silent medium. Whatever it can express, it has to express in silence. The challenge for the artist is whether you represent things happening or human interactions that involve speaking and listening. So as much as there is talking going on in the School of Athens, it means that more than half are listening. It puts the viewer of the painting as ‘listeners’. when he’s painting someone who is listening, he is painting you, the viewer, in that place.”

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