The School of Athens

The architecture is as important as the figures. The great barrel vaults recall the new Saint Peter's that Bramante was designing at the time, and Bramante may have advised on the perspective. Every group is arranged so your eye moves in a relaxed rhythm from one cluster to the next, yet the whole composition converges on the two central figures. Look for the young man at the far right edge, in a dark cap, looking straight out at you: that is Raphael himself, standing beside the painter Sodoma. Plato's bearded face is thought to be modelled on Leonardo da Vinci.

Raphael was in his mid twenties when Pope Julius the Second gave him the commission to decorate his private library, this room, in fifteen oh eight. The four walls represent theology, poetry, law and philosophy, and the School of Athens is the philosophy wall. Its success brought Raphael the rest of the papal apartments and made him the leading painter in Rome. The fresco has never left the wall it was painted on, so what you see is the original surface, restored but intact. Its balance and clarity became the standard by which Western painting measured itself for the next three hundred years.

Did You Know? Raphael added the Heraclitus figure with Michelangelo's features after seeing the first half of the Sistine ceiling in fifteen eleven, cutting into finished plaster to fit him in.