The School of Athens is a fresco Raphael painted in the Vatican between 1509 and 1511, and he did not write a single name on it. Plato and Aristotle stand at the center, and the brooding man writing on the steps is usually said to be Michelangelo. Raphael did put himself in: he is the young man in the black cap at the far right, looking straight out of the picture.
Around Plato, who holds the Timaeus and points up, and Aristotle, who holds the Ethics, stand dozens of other figures, all of them painted in the Stanza della Segnatura, a room in the apartments of Pope Julius II. Every name on the wall comes from what a figure holds, how he stands, or whom he resembles.
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The self-portrait is the safest name on the wall, and even it arrived late. The full size drawing Raphael made for the fresco, now in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan, does not contain it. Neither does it contain the man on the steps, the one the Vatican Museums call a portrait of Michelangelo, a figure the Ambrosiana's own description calls the Thinker.
That second figure sits on a piece of plaster laid in after the original smooth surface had dried, according to the art historian Lisa Pon. So Raphael had worked that wall once already, and he went back to it to add faces. The Ambrosiana says the brooding man was probably added in 1511, when, according to Vasari, Bramante secretly took Raphael to see the Sistine Chapel.
The story is a good one, which may be why it has a critic. Maria Loh, as Pon quotes her, calls it one of the best loved stories of Renaissance art history and a "precious myth" that is "a modern invention first proposed in 1941." If she is right, the label printed under the most talked about face on the wall is a twentieth century guess.
What does each philosopher carry?
Raphael left every figure unlabeled, so the names rest on props and poses. As Smarthistory puts it, Raphael "has not placed any names within the painting." The Vatican Museums' own description reads the wall that way: Plato points upward and holds the Timaeus, Aristotle holds the Ethics, Pythagoras is in the foreground explaining the diatesseron, and Diogenes lies on the stairs with a dish.
The group on the right works the same way. The Vatican says Euclid is teaching geometry to his pupils, while Zoroaster holds the heavenly sphere and Ptolemy the earthly one. Even the globes are not settled.
Vasari, in 1568, called the figure with his back turned and a globe in his hand Zoroaster. The usual reading now puts Ptolemy with his back to us, and the historian Christiane Joost-Gaugier has argued for Ptolemy and Strabo instead.
That is why the authors of a Bridges conference paper on the fresco write that identities "have a way of shifting with the passage of time." The props give the philosophers their names. The faces are a separate question.
What You'll Discover
Whose faces Raphael borrowed.
The corner where Raphael put himself.
Who the man on the steps really is.
Who stands in white behind Pythagoras.