Philosophie im Tiefenraum. Die Schule von Athen als Weltentwurf Raffaels

Abstract

The agents in Raphael’s The School of Athens belong as much to antiquity as they do to the Renaissance. This is also true with respect to the large hall in which they move. Already these observations show that, while depicting a distant world of the past, Raphael also works through questions of his own time. Architecture and agents are meticulously related to one another, so that the interplay of spatiality and philosophical concepts represents the idea of a harmonic world-order. This conception of the world, however, will last only for a short time – even in the work of Raphael.