RaphaelThe School of Athens · 1509–11All 16A studio guide · Rome, 1509–1511
Imagine you are Raphael, about twenty-six and new to Rome, about to paint a wall of the pope's library. This guide follows what your process would have been, from the drawings and the giant cartoon to the days of wet plaster and the figure you added last.
The design evidence is unusually rich: drawings in Vienna, Oxford and Frankfurt, and the full-size cartoon in Milan, restored in 2014–19. The order of painting on the wall is inferred from fresco practice. Each chapter opens with a note on what its evidence is. The slider steps through nine stages; all but the last are AI reconstructions.
Heraclitus
Stage 9 of 9Added last, on his own patch of plaster. This is the wall today.
EvidenceThe Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille, the Royal Collection and Vasari; the payment of January 1509.
You are Raffaello Sanzio, born in Urbino in 1483, the son of the court painter Giovanni Santi. You trained in the circle of Perugino and took your first commission, an altarpiece, in 1500.
From about 1504 to 1508 you worked in Florence, where you studied Leonardo and Michelangelo. By late 1508 you were in Rome, and on 13 January 1509 you are first documented there.
Vasari says it was Bramante, the pope's architect and a man from your own region, who wrote to you and talked Pope Julius II into using you. Other painters, Sodoma and Lorenzo Lotto among them, were already at work in the papal apartments.
EvidenceThe Vatican Museums and Vasari. The order in which the room's walls were painted is disputed.
The room is Julius II's library and study, now called the Stanza della Segnatura. Sodoma seems to have begun the vault, and you probably painted its four roundels first.
A theologian devised the programme. Your four walls stand for the faculties of a library: the Disputa and this wall for supernatural and rational truth, the Virtues and Law for the good, and Parnassus for beauty. Above this wall, a roundel of Philosophy presides.
EvidenceSurviving sheets at the Albertina in Vienna, the Ashmolean in Oxford and the Städel in Frankfurt.
You design in drawings. You pose studio models, often assistants, and draw them in metalpoint on paper you have tinted pink or grey, adding the lights in white lead. Groups are worked out as wholes, single figures from life, statues and their niches with ruler and compass. These five sheets survive.
EvidenceThe Ambrosiana's 2014–19 restoration of the cartoon, by Maurizio Michelozzi with Alberto Rocca, and the Lombardy catalogue record.
Before the wall, you make the whole design at full size. The cartoon is 285 by 804 centimetres, built from 210 half-sheets of paper glued in seven strips. The paper was toned with charcoal and ochre in glue, and it carries notes for the architecture in red chalk.
You enlarged the design from a squared drawing, sketching with charcoal on a long cane. Shadows were laid by dabbing charcoal dust and then hatched; the lights are white lead.
The cartoon was pricked along every contour, but it never touched the wall. The holes still have their burrs of paper on the back. It was pricked through onto a second sheet underneath, and that copy was cut up day by day, used on the wet plaster and lost. The original, wholly yours, was kept.
EvidenceMostly inferred from fresco practice; infrared of the Heraclitus figure; Luitpold De Vecchi's count of 47 day-patches (1966).
The masonry gets a rough layer of lime and sand, the arriccio. No underdrawing on it has been reported.
Each morning a patch of fine plaster, the intonaco, is laid for only what you can paint before it dries. That day's patch is a giornata; its edges usually follow contours.
The piece of the copied cartoon for that patch is held to the wet plaster and dabbed with a bag of charcoal dust. Lines for the architecture were probably scored into the plaster, as on the Parnassus.
An old study counts 47 patches on this wall, so about 47 painting days spread over 1509–11. No modern map of them has been published.
EvidenceThe order is inferred from fresco practice; the figures follow the cartoon; analogies from the Parnassus wall. No pigment analysis of this wall has been published.
You paint each patch while it is wet, so the colour, ground in water, binds into the lime as it sets. Work from the top down. Blues are another matter: on the Parnassus, the sky was finished with lapis lazuli painted on dry over a fresco base, and blues on this wall were noted as largely lost by 1846. Expect lime-proof earths, lime white, black and green earth, with the blues added last.
AI-generatedAfter step 7: the floor
Start at the top, where the plaster is highest, so that drips and splashes fall on wall you have not painted yet. The coffered barrel vaults and the patches of sky come first.
The cartoon has no architecture at all, only perspective lines and a plan sketch, so a separate architectural cartoon was probably used. It is lost.
Next come the pilasters, cornices and the two great statues: Apollo at left and Minerva at right. Your study sheet for Minerva shows the niche drawn with ruler and compass.
A day's patch of plaster usually ends along a contour, so the figures in front of the architecture can wait for days of their own.
Paint the figures on the top step, with Plato and Aristotle framed by the furthest arch. Their poses follow the cartoon closely.
Faces are painted quickly and finely while the plaster is wet. On the Parnassus wall next door, assistants seem to have worked mainly on drapery.
Then the broad marble steps, with Diogenes sprawled across them and the two men climbing at right, whose poses you worked out in a drawing now in Oxford.
Where Heraclitus sits today, the steps are empty. The cartoon has no one there.
Pythagoras writes in his book while the figures round him lean in, much as in your metalpoint study in Vienna. The tablet he is shown is not in the cartoon either.
Euclid bends over his slate with a pair of compasses, his pupils crowding round, as in your drawing now at the Ashmolean. Vasari says the figure is a portrait of Bramante; that is his claim, not a fact.
Last, the lowest band: the patterned floor, laid out in perspective toward the same vanishing point as the vaults. With it, the design of the cartoon is complete.
EvidenceThe cartoon, the plaster join and infrared of the figure. Who he portrays is contested.
When the wall seems finished, you add a man. Heraclitus, brooding on the front step with his head on his hand and writing on a marble block, is not in the cartoon. He sits on his own patch of plaster, set into the dried surface around him.
In infrared, pounce dots run over the whole figure, so you made a separate cartoon for him. He was probably painted after August 1511, when the first half of Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling was unveiled; his heavy, sculptural body recalls its prophets.
Since 1941 he has often been called a portrait of Michelangelo himself. That reading dates from Redig de Campos in 1941, and the art historian Maria Loh calls it an invention; the Ambrosiana says critics now prefer to call the figure il penseroso, the thinker.
EvidenceKeck (1984), citing Bellori; the Vatican Museums; press coverage of the 1995–96 cleaning.