The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Raphael · a wall painting in buon fresco filling an arched lunette · about five metres high by nearly eight wide · a crowd on two levels and a flight of steps, under three coffered vaults with the last open to sky · Stanza della Segnatura, Apostolic Palace, Vatican · 1509–1511 · as cleaned in the 1990s
Mode
Monumental fresco as assembly; an idea given as a crowd in a built space, with no narrative and no words beyond two book titles
Mythos
The assembly of the wise; the two directions of thought; the house of knowledge unfinished
Phase
One hour on two levels, painted 1509–1511, with one figure added after the rest was finished
Presentation
Buon fresco on an arched lunette wall, about five metres by nearly eight; two levels, a flight of steps, three vaults, two niches
Register
From a cynic on the steps to two marble gods; grandeur held calm, with no terror
Scale
One building, one hour, a thousand years of thinkers
Governing Proposition
Two men walk forward out of an arch, one with a forefinger raised and one with a palm held level, and a building that is still being built carries every line of its pavement and its vaults into the gap between them. Below them, on the floor and the steps, knowledge is a thing shown: a tablet held up by a boy, a slate under a pair of compasses, two globes. The wager of the wall is that thought can be painted as a crowd in a public room, each figure teaching, following or refusing, and legible at one glance from the door, and the painter, having finished it, cut back into the plaster to add one man alone.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The wall is one of four in a room on the upper floor of the Apostolic Palace, the Stanza della Segnatura, which Julius II had painted between 1508 and 1511 for the apartment he took above the Borgia rooms, where he refused to live. The four walls carry theology, philosophy, poetry and law. The Disputa, the Disputation of the Sacrament, faces this wall; the Parnassus and the Virtues with the lawgivers beneath them hold the two window walls; in the tondo of the ceiling over this wall a figure of Philosophy carries the words “CAUSARUM COGNITIO”, the knowledge of causes. Julius had engaged older painters for the room and dismissed them for Raphael, who had come from Florence at twenty-five. He painted this wall in 1509–1511, between his twenty-sixth and twenty-eighth years, while Michelangelo was painting the Sistine vault in the same palace. The name the wall now carries is not his; it bears no title and no names.
The field is an arched lunette, about five metres high at the crown and nearly eight wide at the base. Inside it the painter built a building: a sequence of coffered barrel vaults, a crossing marked by pendentives and the base of a drum, and a last arch open to sky. The nearest vault is cut by the arch of the real wall, so the room seems to continue into the picture. The building resembles Bramante’s designs for the new St Peter’s, whose foundation stone had been laid in April 1506; Vasari says that Bramante drew the architecture for him; the record does not settle it. Like the basilica, the building is unfinished. Under its vaults a crowd, commonly counted in the fifties, stands, sits, writes, argues and reads on two levels, a platform under the arches and a floor nearest the viewer, with a flight of steps between them running the width of the wall. In niches on the side walls of the painted building stand two statues: Apollo with a lyre on the left, Minerva on the right.
At the centre, under the farthest arch, two men walk forward, the only figures in the picture who come toward the viewer. Each carries a book with its title on the fore-edge: the one on the left “TIMEO”, the one on the right “ETICA”. They are Plato and Aristotle, and the two books are the only names on the wall. Plato’s right forefinger points up; Aristotle’s right hand is held out flat, palm down. Every orthogonal of the pavement, the entablatures and the coffers runs to the gap between them. The two gestures are the composition’s one argument, and the two statues state it again: the god of music and prophecy on Plato’s side, the goddess of practical wisdom on Aristotle’s. Everything else on the wall takes its place in relation to that gap.
Movement II
On the floor, nearest the viewer, are the arts that measure. At the lower left a man sits writing in a large book while a boy, on tiptoe, holds a tablet up before him with a diagram drawn on it, by the usual reading the musical consonances; the tradition calls the writer Pythagoras. Others crane over his shoulder and copy, among them a turbaned man the tradition calls Averroes, and at the far left an old man with a child and a figure crowned with leaves reading a book are called Zeno and Epicurus. A young man in white among them turns and looks straight out of the picture, and the tradition has not agreed who he is: a della Rovere prince, Hypatia, or no one in particular. A figure enters at a run from the left edge.
At the lower right a bald man bends with a pair of compasses over a slate laid on the floor, drawing a geometrical figure, and four youths crowd round it, each at a different stage of following the construction, one of them explaining to another. The tradition calls him Euclid, or Archimedes. Behind them two men hold up globes, one terrestrial and one celestial: the crowned man with his back turned is called Ptolemy, through a confusion of the astronomer with the kings of Egypt, and the man facing him Zoroaster. At the right edge, in the last row, a young man in a dark cap looks out at the viewer. Vasari says that Raphael painted himself here from a mirror, and the identification has not been seriously doubted. His companion in white is called Sodoma, or Perugino.
The lower level is where knowledge appears as an object: a tablet, a slate, two globes. Everyone around them is showing, following or copying. Above, on the platform, no one holds an instrument; they hold books, or nothing, and talk. The steps are the passage between the two levels and the picture’s one hierarchy: the measurers nearest the viewer, the arguers farthest and highest, and the eye made to climb from the globe to the raised finger. Dante had listed the same company in Limbo, “Euclide geomètra e Tolomeo” among them (Inf. IV.142), where the souls live, in Virgil’s words, “sanza speme”, without hope (IV.42). The wall sets them under an open heaven in a pope’s palace and gives them work to do.
Movement III
On the platform, under the vaults, are the arts that argue. At the upper left a man in profile in a green mantle counts the points of an argument on his fingers to a group, among them a young man in armour who listens. The tradition calls the speaker Socrates and the soldier Alcibiades, or Alexander. Nothing on the wall names them; what the wall gives is a man reasoning aloud, a soldier being counted at, and the others attending. At the upper right, by Minerva’s niche, standing figures converse, and one stands at the head of the stairs. With the exception of the two solitaries and the two who look out, every figure on the wall is showing, following or disputing something with someone else. The picture’s action is transmission.
Between the groups the two walk forward with their books. The finger and the palm divide thought into two directions, up toward what is beyond the senses and level toward what is in them, and the picture’s claim is that the two can walk together, in step and in talk. The marble gods repeat the division from their niches. Across the room the facing lunette holds the Disputa: the sacrament on an altar, the Church on earth below and heaven above. Philosophy faces theology across one floor, under a ceiling that names both, and the knowledge of causes faces the knowledge of God. That relation is the room’s. What this wall brings to it is an open arch at the end of its building, with sky where a dome would be.
Milton, a century and a half later, saw the same assembly from the other side. His fallen angels sit apart on a hill, “reasoned high / Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate” and “found no end, in wandering mazes lost” (PL II.558–561); his archangel, who shares the painter’s name, tells Adam to “be lowly wise: / Think only what concerns thee, and thy being” (VIII.173–174), which is Aristotle’s hand. The wall takes neither side. It lets the finger and the palm walk out of the light together, and puts the whole dispute under a vault that is not yet closed.
Movement IV
The wall was painted in buon fresco, into wet plaster laid a patch at a time, from a full-scale cartoon. The cartoon survives, in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, and it carries the figures and not the architecture: the crowd was composed before the building was drawn round it. The building was then ruled and incised into the wet intonaco with straightedge and compass, at the width of the wall, and made true from the room’s door. Some detail was finished a secco. No pose is repeated, and each group is a different problem solved: four pupils at four stages of understanding one construction, two men walking in step at different speeds of thought, a man thrown across the steps below Aristotle with a bowl beside him and a sheet in his hand, the tradition’s Diogenes.
One figure is not in the cartoon. In the foreground, left of centre, a man sits on the steps with his head on his left hand, writing on a sheet laid on a block of stone, in a heavy sleeved garment and boots. He is painted on a separate patch of plaster cut into the finished wall, and on close looking the seam shows. He is heavier than his neighbours, drawn as mass where they are drawn as line, in another painter’s manner. The tradition reads him as Heraclitus, the weeping philosopher, with the features of Michelangelo and the boots of a stonecutter, and places the patch after August 1511, when the first half of the Sistine vault was uncovered in the same palace. The reading of the face is the tradition’s; the date is an inference from the manner, not a document.
Whatever his name, his effect on the wall is not in dispute. Before him the foreground was bare floor and every figure belonged to a conversation. After him the picture holds one solitary mind, head on hand, writing, who shows nothing to anyone, in modern boots among the ancients. The sociable order of the whole is interrupted by a new kind of thinker, and the composition took him as the counterweight it needed, sitting on the axis the cartoon had left open. The addition is the painter’s own second thought on a finished work, and it is the one place where the rival’s manner stands inside his picture.
Movement V
Two centuries before the wall, Dante had walked through the same company. In the fourth canto of the Inferno, in the noble castle of Limbo: “vidi ’l maestro di color che sanno / seder tra filosofica famiglia”
“The Master I beheld of those who know, / Sit with his philosophic family.” (Inf. IV.131–132). Socrates and Plato stand nearest the master, and the list runs on through Democritus, Diogenes, Heraclitus, Zeno, Euclid, Ptolemy and Averroes. The wall’s conventional roster shares most of those names, and its arrangement answers the poem’s: the family about the masters, in a building instead of a castle. The poem holds them for fourteen lines and descends; the wall holds them and stops. It is the assembly without the journey, a diagram of thought rather than a story of it, and that is both its limit and its clarity.
Julius died on 21 February 1513, and Raphael on 6 April 1520, at thirty-seven. The wall outlived them both as the exhibit of a manner. Giorgio Ghisi engraved it about 1550, and Anton Raphael Mengs copied it at full size about 1755; through Raphael’s shop and Giulio Romano it became the school of Rome; the Carracci and Poussin took its grouping; the academies from Bologna to London took the Stanze as their canon, Reynolds closing his Discourses on the Vatican rooms; Ingres built the Apotheosis of Homer of 1827 on it, and Delaroche the Hemicycle of the École des Beaux-Arts; the Nazarenes revived it; and the Pre-Raphaelites named themselves against precisely this Raphael. It has become the image of philosophy itself, reproduced wherever the subject is taught.
In May 1527, sixteen years after the wall was finished, the troops of the Sack of Rome were quartered in the Stanze and scratched their names into the frescoes; the wooden dado of the room was lost. The wall was restored in 1702–1703 and retouched afterwards, took the soot of candles and braziers, and became a corridor on the route of the Vatican Museums. It was cleaned in the 1990s. What is seen now is nearly entire: a seam round the added patch, wear along the lower edge and at the figures nearest the floor, some abraded detail laid a secco, and no figure lost. The humanist room it was painted for is gone, the men it portrays as ancients are unnamed, and the title it carries was given long after, by people already arguing about who was who. The two books still carry the only words. Two men still walk forward out of an unfinished building, one hand raised and one hand level, toward whoever comes in at the door.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure. The argument is two men walking forward under an arch, one hand raised and one held level, and the building that makes their walk the axis of everything. Remove the architecture and they are a pair in a crowd; remove the steps and measurers and arguers share one floor. The corner groups are required: the tablet, the slate and the globes are the only places where knowledge is shown as an object. The statues name the two directions again; the cynic is the refusal every academy contains. What resists is the crowd: a third of the figures are there to be many. The added figure, unrequired by the design, is required by the picture, which without him has no solitary mind.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Three things hold without the programme. Knowledge is a social act: nearly every group is a showing. A man writes while a boy holds up a diagram; four heads follow a geometer’s compasses; a man in profile counts his argument to a soldier; the two at the centre dispute as they walk. Thought is transmission between generations in a public building, not inspiration in a cell. Thought has two directions, up and level, and the two can walk together. And the exception, added last: one man alone, head on hand, writing on a block, in a workman’s boots. Held at 9.0 because the frame of meaning, the knowledge of causes facing theology, is the room’s, and because arrangement states less than an event can.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The elevation is architectural and serene, reached in a few places: the coffered vaults running back over the crowd to an arch that opens on sky; the two central figures stepping forward out of that light; the marble gods calm in their niches above the talk; the whole, read at once from the door. There is no terror, and no second summit of the kind a vault holds bay by bay. The register is one register, grandeur held in measure. Below the steps the passages are humane rather than high: the cynic and the geometer’s pupils move the viewer to recognition, not transport. Frequency is limited by the form, one image in one hour, and height by a temperament that refuses the overwhelming.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The archetype is the assembly of the wise, from the symposium to Dante’s “filosofica famiglia” (Inf. IV.132), and it is built rather than evoked: the ascent by steps from measurement to speculation; the two directions of thought as two hands; the generations, boys and old men in one hall; the house of thought as an unfinished church. Each figure stays particular: a cynic with a bowl, a geometer’s bald head. Held at 9.0 for three reasons. The structure is a diagram, not a story: no fall, no sacrifice, no return, and the top of this axis is built from events. The roster, as the tradition reads it, is largely Dante’s Limbo inherited whole. And the typology that would deepen it, pagan wisdom facing the sacrament, belongs to the room, outside the unit.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The inheritance is the painted row of famous men, each sage with his name beneath; Perugino’s square and temple in the Delivery of the Keys; Leonardo’s Last Supper. The departure: the row dissolved into a crowd in action; the labels dropped, so that identity rides on posture and attribute alone; a pagan assembly housed in the architecture of the pope’s new basilica; living men painted as ancients; a whole building as the stage. The stake was the painter’s: twenty-six, given a pope’s rooms over the older men who had begun them. The departure was welcomed, not censured; the cost fell on the career, not the wall. A synthesis that became the standard is a swerve that risks nothing visible, and the axis says so.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The work knows what it knows through an arched wall above the eye. The real lunette becomes the nearest painted arch; the orthogonals of pavement and cornice run into the gap between the two central figures; the steps descend toward the viewer, so the measurers are nearest and the speculators farthest; the last arch opens on sky, so the house of thought is unfinished, as the real basilica was. Substitute a panel and the simultaneity of the disciplines, the hierarchy by height and the open heaven go. Held off the top because the lunette is given by the room, the viewpoint sits above any standing eye, and the form’s answer to the facing wall is credited only as an answer.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Evidence over promise: five centuries of return, and the basic questions still open. Who is who: whether the geometer is Euclid or Archimedes; whether the crowned man is Ptolemy at all; who the youth in white is; whether the soldier is Alexander or Alcibiades. What the building is: Bramante’s St Peter’s, an ideal, or both. What the added patch means: homage, rivalry or the correction of an empty foreground. Whether the wall is a school of Athens at all, under a title given long after. The readings run from Vasari through Bellori, Burckhardt, Wölfflin and Gombrich to the cleaning. Held a step below because most disputes concern identification and programme, not what the wall means, which has stayed legible for five hundred years.
Score: 9.2 / 10
On view since 1511, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the wall completed what the Last Supper began. The narrative group in a built space was raised to the scale of a building, an idea given as a crowd, legible at a glance: the charter of the classical manner. The discount: the reach belongs to Raphael’s Roman manner as a whole, and this wall is its exhibit. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the school of Rome through Raphael’s shop; the Carracci and Poussin; the academies from Bologna to London, Reynolds closing his Discourses on the Vatican rooms and Mengs copying this wall; Ingres’s Apotheosis of Homer and Delaroche’s Hemicycle; the Pre-Raphaelites, named against this Raphael. It is now the image of philosophy itself.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over 515 years in place: through the Sack of 1527, when soldiers were quartered in the room; through the restoration of 1702–1703 and later retouching; through soot, damp and the traffic of a museum corridor; and through a cleaning in the 1990s that raised no dispute of the Sistine kind. The surface is nearly free of its moment: the contemporary portraits read as ancients, and the image has outlived its programme. What holds the axis down is physical and small: fresco is a mortal surface; the seam round the added patch is visible; the lower edge is worn; the wall is seen through a cleaning and a crowd. No figure is lost. It is among the best-preserved monumental frescoes of its century.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Judged as command of buon fresco on a lunette, with an architecture built on wet plaster. The architecture: a crossing, three vaults and a pavement ruled and incised into the intonaco at the scale of a wall, carrying a crowd without crowding it. The groups, each a different problem solved: four pupils in four stages of understanding; the cynic thrown across the steps. The drawing: no pose repeated, and the whole crowd composed in the cartoon before a stroke was painted. Colour keyed at the centre and graded away. The costs: the added figure is drawn in another painter’s manner, heavier than its neighbours, and the join shows; the viewpoint sits above the standing eye; the figures at the back are small for their setting.
Score: 9.5 / 10
The two most distant elements are the cynic sprawled alone on the steps with a bowl, and the marble Apollo in its niche above him. They obey one law: one perspective, one pavement, one fall of light, and one standard of the figure. Every gesture belongs to a conversation, and every conversation sits on an orthogonal that runs to the centre. The range is wide in temperament and narrow in kind: one building, one hour, men thinking. Narrowness is not coherence, and that holds the axis. What resists is the added figure: another scale and manner, on the axis the cartoon left open, the only body drawn as mass rather than line. The composition absorbed him; the two who look out break the law of attention by convention.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The orders held in one structure: the intellect, a tablet, a slate, two globes and the talk on the platform; the generations, four ages of men in transmission; the city, in a basilica being built; the sacred as the pagan world had it, two gods in niches and an open heaven; history, a thousand years in one hour; consciousness, in the brooder and the self-portrait’s look; the state, faintly, in a youth in armour listening. They are integrated by the building and the steps, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no family, no labour, no women unless the youth in white is one, no death, no weather. One hall of men in talk cannot hold what a vault or a chapel holds, and the figure says so.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition and The Made at 9.5, with The Imperishable at 9.4 and The Living Form at 9.3. A wall that fixed the classical manner and became the image of philosophy for three centuries of academies, a command of fresco in which a building drawn on wet plaster carries a crowd without crowding it, a surface that has survived 515 years in place with no figure lost, and a lunette whose form is the instrument of the hierarchy.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.5: one hall of men in talk holds the intellect, the generations, the city, the pagan sacred and a thousand years of history, with no family, no labour, no women, no death and no natural world. Above it, The Unconcealment, The Sublime, The Archetypal Deep and The Swerve, each at 9.0 and held by one description: the disclosure is by arrangement, the elevation is calm, the myth is a diagram, and the departure was a synthesis welcomed on arrival.
The Necessity Cap clears at 9.1 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.3, The Made at 9.5, The Inner Law at 9.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: Pressure on Tradition at 9.5 and The Imperishable at 9.4 clear the bar of 8.5 by nearly a point, and The Unconcealment at 9.0, The Archetypal Deep at 9.0 and The Swerve at 9.0 clear it by half a point. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it governs falls below 9.0, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.5. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the fresco as it stands after the cleaning of the 1990s (the painted architecture, the two statues in their niches with the grisaille reliefs beneath them, the figures on two levels and the steps between, and the figure on the added patch of plaster, painted 1509–1511), and of how it was made and what was done to it afterwards. No image or written source on the fresco was consulted. Not in the unit, and neither scored nor credited: the three other walls of the Stanza, the ceiling, the later dado, the cartoon in the Ambrosiana, the drawings, the copies and the prints, which are evidence of the making and of the reach. The added figure is the painter’s own second thought and is inside the unit, credited and charged where the entries say. Two painted words, the titles on the two books, are quoted, and the inscription of the tondo above as context; the signature on the geometer’s collar, the tablet and the slate are not quoted. Plato, Aristotle, the two statues, the self-portrait and the separate plaster of the added figure are stated as the record gives them; every other name is the tradition’s label for a figure whose action on the wall is what is credited, and no conjectural name carries a score. Dante is quoted from the Italian of Project Gutenberg e-text #1012, with Longfellow’s line-for-line translation (1867), e-text #1004, beneath; Milton from the 1674 text, e-text #26; both as benchmark and reception, not scored. Vasari and later writers are paraphrased. Later hands are neither credited nor charged, and the cleaned surface is read as the best available evidence of the original. Figures that could not be verified, among them the exact dimensions, the number of figures, the number of steps and the number of giornate, are not given.