| Home - Questioning The Painting - Analyzing Figures - Connecting To Literature - Architecture - The Painter - Coming Full Circle - Bibliography |
When we first start looking at a painting or any type of artifact we ask questions. By the time we finish our research we come full circle and still find ourselves asking questions because nothing can be defined clearly.
"If The School of Athens were an illustration, it could never have come to dominate our culture over the last five centuries as it has, for it has done so without reference to any particular text. The scene we view in The School of Athens is highly dramatic, filled with intensely vital characters energetically communicating with one another. Yet so silent is their discourse, so void of specific content, that with very few exceptions Plato's and Aristotle's books, Pythagora's tablet, the geometers problem we cannot hear what they are saying and cannot ascertain any determinate meaning in those gestures that seem so full of significance but are in fact so empty. The School of Athens suggests a transparent intelligibility but limits comprehension to the participants it depicts, resolutely withdrawing from our attempts to read it." (Most, 180-181)
"For Raphael's fresco seems eminently legible; it is filled with books and with figures who are all engaged in discursive activities, incessantly talking, listening, and above all understanding. Yet we cannot read it. Precisely that is why it never ceases to fascinate us." (Most, 182)
