School Of Wisdom

This peice of art is a mirror of balance,with one side being physical-down to earth,and one being in the ether. The School of Athens was a fresco painted in 1510 and finished in 1511 by Raphael. The painting displays a Roman building filled with some of the greatest philospophers of the time such as, Plato, Aristotle, diogenes, Xenophon, Eschines, Alcibiades, Socrates, Parmenides, Xenocrates, Aristoxenes, Pythagoras, Averroës, Zeno and Epicurus. You can tell that the building is built using Roman architecture because there are many examples of Roman and some Greek architecture. You can clearly arches spanning the length of the painting and in between the main chamber where these intuitive philosophers are depicted and the next chamber further back you can barely make out a dome supported by columns. The Greeks had a god for everything, Ares was the god of war and Zeus was the god of the sky and thunder.In this statue there is 2 statues of goddesses, Athena and Apollo. The nature of this painting is the studious nature of people from different time period and different cities; there is lots of learning and teaching going on in this painting by some very intelligent philosophers. However in order to make these famous philosophers recognizable the artist of this painting had to use many artistic techniques, in this painting Raphael uses lines of perspective to give the painting depth and lead us to the vanishing and focal point. However just making the background seem realistic is not enough to make a masterpiece, Raphael also used foreshortening as well as light and shade to make the figures look realistic and lifelike. All artwork can be traced back to a few elements: color, value, form, line, space, shape and texture. The colors in this painting are extremely vivid especially in the togas. . The form of the objects in this painting were very intensely painted with great accuracy by Raphael. Space is another element crucial to producing a "perfect" painting, the space filled by objects is important but the negative space matters as well. This painting gives you a feel of great space. There are also many shapes in this picture that make up the building, the people and also the background. . When i first looked at this painting one of the first things i noticed was the togas that the people in this painting were wearing; togas are a distinctive garb from ancient Rome.Thanks to this painting we have a good idea of what Greece looked like in Raphael's time.