The School of Athens

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.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Angie Hobbs 24 episodes
  Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Warwick
• Valery Rees 4 episodes
  Renaissance scholar and senior member of the Language Department at the School of Economic Science
• Jill Kraye 3 episodes
  Professor of the History of Renaissance Philosophy and Librarian at the Warburg Institute at the University of London

Related episodes

• The Sistine Chapel
  
  31 Mar, 2022 700 Arts
• Plato’s Symposium
  
  2 Jan, 2014 180 Ancient, medieval, and Eastern philosophy
• Averroes
  
  5 Oct, 2006 100 Philosophy
• Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists
  
  27 May, 2010 700 Arts
• The Artist
  
  28 Mar, 2002 700 Arts
• Neoplatonism
  
  19 Apr, 2012 180 Ancient, medieval, and Eastern philosophy
• The Translation Movement
  
  2 Oct, 2008 500 Science
• Socrates
  
  27 Sep, 2007 180 Ancient, medieval, and Eastern philosophy
• Renaissance Magic
  
  17 Jun, 2004 130 Parapsychology and occultism
• Erasmus
  
  9 Feb, 2012 270 History of Christianity
• Aristotle’s Politics
  
  6 Nov, 2008 320 Political science
• Avicenna
  
  8 Nov, 2007 180 Ancient, medieval, and Eastern philosophy
• Plato’s Republic
  
  29 Jun, 2017 100 Philosophy
• Al-Ghazali
  
  19 Mar, 2015 210 Philosophy and theory of religion
• Rhetoric
  
  28 Oct, 2004 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
• St Thomas Aquinas
  
  17 Sep, 2009 180 Ancient, medieval, and Eastern philosophy
• Aristotle’s Biology
  
  7 Feb, 2019 570 Biology
• Alcuin
  
  30 Jan, 2020 270 History of Christianity
• Common Sense Philosophy
  
  21 Jun, 2007 100 Philosophy
• Galen
  
  10 Oct, 2013 610 Medicine and health

---

Programme ID: b00j7txt

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00j7txt

Auto-category: 759.5 (Renaissance art)