We will be spending some time on Raphael's wonderful School of Athens (representing natural and moral philosophy) in my philosophy class this evening. I am reading a collection of essay, Raphael's 'School of Athens', edited by Marcia Hall, and it is blowing me away. Raphael is now my third favourite painter!


Apart from clicking on this image of the painting to access a virtual map that identifies various of the philosophers, I also recommend this student-built site.

The other walls of the Stanza della Segnatura hold ...







... The Disputation of the Holy Sacrament (La Disputa, representing theology) and The Parnassus (below, representing poetry). The paintings and other decorations of the room represent the whole of human learning, as it was understood in the Renaissance. The room was known as "the upper library" in the time of Julius II, the pope who comissioned the painting. Earlier in his career Julius had helped Pope Sixtus IV organize the Vatican Library (which I would imagine was "the lower library"). This smaller library was the pope's private room for study and meeting with formal visitors, and contained a representative sampling of the great books of theology, philosophy (including what we would now call the sciences), poetry (including what we would now call the arts), and law. It soon became used for the signing of formal papal documents, and was thus known as "the signing room" (Stanza della Segnatura) by the time Vasari wrote his Lives of the Artists, from which we draw much of what we know about Raphael.






The fourth wall has several images, together representing jurisprudence. These include Justinian Presenting the Pandects to Trebonianus (symbolizing Roman law) and Gregory IX Approving the Decretals (symbolizing canon law), and The Cardinal Virtues (below).

See the ceiling frescoes here and a view of the room from the side here.