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The Reading Images Project |
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The Reading Images Project |
Iconography: precedents
One of the central methods by which art historians draw meaning from a work of art is via comparison. The goal is to determine the ways in which a given artist might reflect his culture and the ways in which he is distinctive. How are similar subjects, figures, and ideas represented in his predecessors and contemporaries? Do spaces that serve the same purpose (e.g., altars, tombs, libraries) share any similarities of content? What might an audience at a given place or time be expected to know to understand the message the artist is providing?
The School of Athens in relation to the precedents
| The Library |
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Julius II saw himself following in the footsteps of his uncle, Sixtus IV, in restoring glory to the papacy and to Rome, and his private collection of books marked him not only as an educated humanist, but also as a model leader. The decoration of his library thus needed both universal and particular significance. On the one hand it was a relatively private space - like the studiolo at Urbino - where Julius could read and write in the "company" of great minds. On the other hand, when he worked in the library he was acting as the pope, not as a private humanist, and anyone who visited him in the library (there were many visitors) would see the intellectual underpinnings of his position. Ironically, Julius was more active than contemplative; he spent more time on military and diplomatic efforts than on intellectual endeavors. Still, like the Piccolomini Library, the Stanza della Segnatura presented a grand setting for its patron that reminded viewers of his special status. |
Famous Men
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Contemporary viewers would have seen Famous Men as a familiar choice of subject for a library decoration, although 15th-century precedents also linked the iconography to settings in which patrons promoted their own self images. The content of the Stanza's frescoes in general, and The School of Athens in particular, would thus have come as no surprise. Raphael's presentation of the content, however, is novel, and it is precisely the complex relationships between the various frescoes (the program ) - which were probably not Raphael's doing (30) - and the formal choices Raphael made that gave the decoration its special force. In making his figures naturalistic forms, interacting in a unfied time and space, Raphael transforms the Famous Men from a collection of faces into seemingly living, and therefore believable, entities. They inhabit a noble world and comport themselves with both dignity and assurance. They are, in other words, models for the real noble world - dignified and assured - of the papacy and of Julius II.
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