The Reading Images Project

Patronage  

For most of western history, including during the Renaissance, works of art were rarely generated spontaneously by artists.  Instead, patrons decided they wanted a work, sought out an artist that pleased them, and made a contract with him to produce the work.  Such contracts as have survived from the Renaissance typically show patrons exercising considerable control over how images appear:  the scale, materials, iconography, and occasionally even the style of works could be laid out in contracts.

The Commission

The School of Athens was commissioned by Pope Julius II as part of an entire room decoration in the Stanza della Segnatura, which was his private library.

The Papal Palace, Vatican City

The Stanza della Segnatura was designed as part of a reconstruction of the northern wing of the Vatican under Pope Nicholas V (ruled 1447-1455).  It was one of a suite of rooms on the top (3rd) floor of the papal palace that Nicholas V probably used as his summer living quarters, and at least some of the spaces were frescoed in the middle of the fifteenth century by Bramantino, Piero della Francesca, Luca Signorelli and Bartolomeo della Gatta.

Under Alexander VI (ruled 1492- 1503) a suite of rooms was decorated on the main floor of the new wing for the pope's private use.  Julius II despised his predecessor, however, and loathed living in the chambers designed for him.  In 1506 he decided to move upstairs to Nicholas V's summer quarters - rooms that are today called the Stanze Vaticane (Stanza della Segnatura, Stanza d’Eliodoro, Stanza dell’Incendio).  Initially several different, well-established artists were employed to redecorate Julius's new apartment, including Perugino, Baldassare Peruzzi, Lorenzo Lotto, and Il Sodoma.(11)  

How Raphael was brought into the project is unclear.  He had been working for private patrons in Florence and appears to have been called to Rome some time in 1508, specifically to participate in the Stanze commission.  Vasari claims that  Bramante, who was redesigning St. Peter's and had been born near Raphael's hometown of Urbino, brought the painter to the pope's attention.  Raphael's teacher, Perugino, was probably already working for the pope in the Stanze, however, and he may well have suggested the young artist to his patron. What's more, Raphael had earlier made works for relatives of the pope in Urbino. (12)  Although Raphael joined the commission as part of a team, by early in 1509 he was in charge of the whole project.

It is generally believed by art historians that the pope assigned an adviser or advisers to Raphael to develop the iconography of the Stanza della Segnatura.  The pope himself was too caught up in war and politics (and perhaps not well enough educated: Julius is said to have admitted, "I am no scholar") to have devised the details of the program, although he may have been responsible for the general plan of decoration. Given that Raphael had a limited education, the sophisticated nature of the room's program seems likely to have been devised by a humanist member of Julius's curia; precisely who that adviser may have been is the subject of much debate in the scholarly literature, although Tommaso Inghirami, the pope's private librarian, is a good candidate. Still, Raphael was certainly responsible for the actual design of the decoration. His prepatory drawings for some of the frescoes show clear evidence of the artist developing compositional ideas.(13)

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