School of Athens Painting Art Showing Technology of the Renaissance
I brainstorm this grade with one of my very favorite works of art, a painting called "The School of Athens."
This is a fresco past the Italian Renaissance creative person Raffaello Sanzio (1483 – 1520), ameliorate known in English as Raphael. (Optional: The Wikipedia entry on Raphael – non to be confused with the archangel or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle – has biographical data and reproductions of many of his major works, including "The School of Athens.")
Raphael painted "The School of Athens" between 1509 and 1511 for Pope Julius Ii. The work is part of a serial of frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican in Rome. It depicts the great philosophers of the ancient world. These philosophers are near all either Greek or Roman and from the menstruation between 600 B.C. to A.D. 500. I want to apply this painting to introduce iii important points almost the material nosotros'll be covering in this class.
THE Commencement Bespeak is that the study of the natural world was part of philosophy. It was a branch of philosophy called "natural philosophy." Many of the people whose work nosotros will study in this class considered themselves to be "philosophers." (For case, Galileo and Newton chosen themselves natural philosophers.) The term "scientist" was not coined until the nineteenth century. Although at that place were no "scientists" (or nobody who called him or herself a scientist) until the nineteenth century, there was certainly lively interest in the natural world.
However, natural philosophy is not just what scientific discipline was called earlier the modern period. Natural philosophy and science were fundamentally different endeavors. Natural philosophy was part of philosophy – the search for wisdom. The word philosophy comes from the Greek roots philo (love) and sophia (wisdom): philosophy is the honey of wisdom. Philosophy, including natural philosophy, was supposed to make a person wiser and more than virtuous. In Plato's Republic, for instance, he argued that astronomy "forces the mind to look upwards, away from this world of ours to college things" (Plato, 247). In a Christian context, natural philosophy was often well-nigh the search for cognition of the Divine Creator. At the terminate of the sixteenth century, the Lutheran astronomer Johannes Kepler declared that the study of the heavens revealed "the Creator'due south most profound plan," and should inspire "cognition, love, and worship of the Creator" (Kepler, 225).
In Raphael's "School of Athens," nosotros can find several figures who wrote, studied and taught well-nigh the natural globe. The two central figures are Plato and Aristotle. Raphael placed them at the center of the limerick because they were (and still are) considered to be 2 of the most influential figures in western intellectual history. Plato (427-347 BC) is the older man on the left. He carries copy of the Timaeus, his work on natural philosophy. In this book, he described the cosmos of the universe – the earth, animals, plants, and human beings – past a benevolent deity. Aristotle (384-322 BC) is the younger man on the right. He was a student of Plato, and he wrote extensively on natural philosophy. Whereas Plato wrote just i pocket-size volume on natural philosophy (the Timaeus is less than 100 pages in modern translation), Aristotle wrote on a wide range of natural philosophical topics. He wrote books on physics (Physics), astronomy (On the Heavens), meteorology (Meteorology), and animals (The History of Animals, On the Move of Animals, On the Parts of Animals, and On the Generation of Animals). (Please note: the links in this paragraph are all OPTIONAL. They are not part of your required reading.)
Raphael included the figures of Zoroaster and Ptolemy to represent the subjects of astronomy and geography. Zoroaster (ca. 628 – ca. 551 BC), an ancient Western farsi philosopher, holds a celestial sphere. Ptolemy (ca. 85 – 165), Greek living in Alexandria under Roman Empire, holds a terrestrial world. Notation that this ancient philosopher believed that the earth was spherical! As we volition run across, the notion that before Columbus anybody thought the world was flat is not true. Ptolemy wrote on astronomy and star divination as well as on geography and cartography.
Raphael included the figures of Euclid and Pythagoras to stand for mathematics and geometry. Euclid (300 BC), on the right, represents geometry. Pythagoras (569 – ca. 475 BC), on the left, represents mathematics.
THE 2nd POINT is that mathematics and geometry (and indeed natural philosophy) were associated with abstract reasoning, not with technical skills. Mathematics, geometry and astronomy were role of the traditional Seven Liberal Arts, a tradition going back to the ancient Romans. The Seven Liberal Arts were equanimous of the 3 literary arts (too known as the trivium) and the four mathematical arts (besides known equally the quadrivium). The subjects of the trivium were grammer, logic and rhetoric; the subjects of the quadrivium were mathematics, geometry, astronomy and music. The Seven Liberal Arts were the foundation of education, and a prerequisite for written report in universities, all the mode through the medieval and early mod periods. Well-nigh of the people we will report in this course were trained in the liberal arts before they turned to more specialized subjects.
The term "liberal arts" is derived from the Latin word liber, which means "free." The liberal arts were those subjects appropriate for and restricted to free men, that is, men who did not have to work for a living and were thus free to devote themselves to intellectual and political life. In the ancient world, manual labor was washed past slaves and non-citizens. In the ancient earth, and indeed for the entire period covered by this course, intellectual work was valued above manual labor – including whatever kind of working with hands. There was, in fact, a sharp sectionalization between working with the mind and working with the hands. If you worked with your hands you were (by definition) not working with your mind, and vice versa. Abstract, pure knowledge was valued above applied skills and know-how.
Of course, there were men and women who had a great bargain of practical understanding of the natural world. Without such practical know-how, there would have been no agronomics, no medicine, no building of roads, bridges, ships or churches. However, the skills and knowledge needed to plant crops, chemical compound herbs into drug, and to build even elaborate structures similar aqueducts or Gothic cathedrals were valued less than abstract, pure mathematics and geometry. One striking example of this devaluation of applied know-how is the ability of Roman engineers to make concrete that would set underwater, and that would withstand the constant buffeting of waves and corrosion of salt water. Many of these structures are still standing today, some 2000 years after they were built. This commodity from concluding year on The History Channel website describes how modern researchers, using sophisticated forms of chemic analysis, have begun to piece together the composition of this physical and to sympathize how Roman engineers accomplished this remarkable feat. And another piece from this year on the Archaeology News Network describes modernistic scientific analyses of Roman concrete that take helped elucidate why the stuff has proved so durable. Why don't nosotros already know how the Romans did this? Because the techniques were never written down (or, if they were, these texts were not preserved). This kind of noesis of the natural world (what we might call "materials science") was only not seen as important enough to write down and preserve generation later on generation. The works of Aristotle, Plato, and Euclid were.
One of the very interesting things well-nigh "The Schoolhouse of Athens" is that is was painted in a period when this abrupt stardom between intellectual and manual work was beginning to pause downward. Practical skills and know-how, the ability to make and do things with natural knowledge, came to exist much more than highly regarded. One group of "manual laborers" that gained considerably more respect and intellectual standing in Raphael's day were artists. We may non call back of artists as "scientists" or as having noesis of the natural world, only in the Renaissance painters, architects and sculptors were expected to know mathematics and geometry, beefcake and materials science. Painters had to exist able to construct pictures using the mathematical technique of linear perspective. Architects needed to know geometry to design buildings. Painters and sculptors needed knowledge of anatomy to accurately portray the human trunk. And painters, sculptors and architects needed intimate noesis of the natural materials (stone, woods, minerals for pigments, etc.) that they worked with. Raphael reflects these changes in the bureaucracy of knowledge in "The Schoolhouse of Athens."
Quite remarkably, Raphael painted HIMSELF among the great philosophers of the ancient world. There he is, only to the right of Ptolemy. The older man to Raphael's right may exist his teacher. Raphael is on the very border of the painting, and indeed, artists were only just coming to be accepted as intellectuals in their own right, on par with philosophers. But he looks direct out at the viewer, a sign of pride and confidence.
Further, Raphael put a number of his artistic friends and colleagues in the painting. Look again at Plato – that's a portrait of Leonardo da Vinci (1452 – 1519).
Wait again at Euclid – that'due south Raphael's good friend the famous architect Donato Bramante (1444 – 1514).
And the gloomy figure in the left foreground? That's the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus (535 – 475 B.C.), only he's modeled after Michelangelo (1475 – 1564), who was painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling in the Vatican while Raphael was working on the Stanza della Segnatura.
Throughout the course we will look at range of motivations for studying the natural world. We will examine the work of people whose written report of the heavens, earth and human being torso was motivated by a philosophical search for knowledge for its own sake – the pursuit of wisdom. And we will besides await at more businesslike motivations, including the need to predict and/or command natural phenomena. Of course, as nosotros will run into, some individuals were stimulated to investigate the world around them by a desire for BOTH wisdom and practical proceeds. Within each section of the course we movement roughly chronologically, merely also up and down bureaucracy of noesis. For example, in the first section of the form, on the heavens, we volition look at attempts to understand the structure of the universe (a philosophical quest), equally well as attempts to gauge the effects of the heavens on life on earth. This latter pursuit, star divination, was largely applied in nature.
THE THIRD Betoken raised past the painting is chronology. This grade is not arranged chronologically, so it is useful to have some sense of the time periods we will cover. When I use the term "antiquity," I refer to the period betwixt 500 B.C. and A.D. 500 (roughly from the rise of Greek city states to the end of Roman empire in the west). When I use the term "medieval" or "Center Ages," I refer to the period betwixt 500 and most 1450. When I employ the term "early on modern," I refer to the period between 1450 and 1800. This tripartite periodization is a cosmos of the early modern menses. Indeed, Raphael'south painting participates in the construction of this particular division of historical eras. In Raphael's mean solar day – a period known as the Renaissance – artists, writers, and philosophers looked dorsum to the ancient earth, the world of ancient Greece and Rome, as period of tremendous intellectual and artistic vitality. They saw the catamenia from the decline and autumn of the Roman Empire to the period immediately prior their ain as a "Night Age." And they believed they were living in an age in which ancient civilization was beingness reborn ("Renaissance" means rebirth). Raphael's "School of Athens" represents this new view of history. The painting, which is full of philosophers from the ancient world, is suffused with light. The figures converse with i another in a building resembling an ancient temple. The building is open to the sky and sunlight bathes the figures and illuminates the whole scene. And call back that Raphael put himself in this painting, and gave several of the ancient philosophers the faces of his contemporaries. In so doing, he drew a connection between the earth of the ancients and his own world, in which the glories of Hellenic republic and Rome were beingness recreated. As well annotation the presence of Hypatia of Alexandria (ca. 370 – ca. 415), the figure in white standing behind and to the correct of Pythagoras. She is the one woman in the painting and she represents the cease of ancient philosophy. Hypatia was a mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher. She was too a pagan and was brutally murdered by a Christian mob. Her death was frequently taken (in the Renaissance) as the end of the aboriginal world and the beginning of the "Dark Ages."
Equally you might expect, medieval people divided history up differently! No i in 900 or 1200 believed he or she was living in a "Nighttime Historic period" or a "Centre Age." But medieval people too divided history into ages of light and darkness. For them, the time before the nascency (actually the conception) of Jesus Christ was the historic period of darkness, and the time after, the time in which they were living, was an age of light. Accordingly, it was in the Middle Ages that the do of dividing time into B.C. (Before Christ) and A.D. (Anno Domini, which is Latin for "in the twelvemonth of our Lord) was devised. (If you lot are interested in reading more about that, wait here and here for biographies of the sixth-century monk Dionysius Exiguus (ca. 470 – ca. 544) who created this dating arrangement.) Because we withal talk well-nigh three historical period – antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the early modern period – and because we withal use B.C. and A.D. (or B.C.E. and C.East.), nosotros see the ongoing influence of both Renaissance thinkers like Raphael and his medieval predecessors.
ASSIGNMENT: Explore "The School of Athens" further on this website. There is a "clickable" version of the painting – place some other figures in the composition. How many are familiar to you? Lookout man the video on this website on the limerick and structure of the fresco (about 18 minutes) and read "The Mystery Surrounding the Fresco" about the inclusion of the tardily antiquarian philosopher Hypatia.
Sources used:
Johannes Kepler, Mysterium Cosmographicum, trans. A. M. Duncan (Norwalk CT: Abaris Books, 1981).
David Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450, 2nd rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Printing, 2008).
Plato, The Republic of Plato, translated with introduction and notes by Francis MacDonald Cornford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945).
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Source: https://beforenewton.blog/daily-readings/august-19/
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