Oct 6, 2026 · 1 hr 8 min · 13 segments
The church father Tertullian famously asked, "What hath Athens to do with Jerusalem?" In this episode, Sophie and Raymond do their best to answer him in their discussion of Raphael's 16th century…
Today we're going to be talking about the painting by Raphael, who's a very famous Renaissance painter.
He's more or less considered to be kind of part of the Holy Trinity of the Renaissance artists.
So you have Raphael, and then you have Michelangelo, and you have Leonardo da Vinci, who were all contemporaries of one another and who did not like one another very much.
And today we're going to talk about the painting that is known to us as School of Athens.
And so we'll start by talking a little bit about who Raphael was and his biography.
Actually, now that I think about it, first let's maybe talk about what the painting looks like.
You've almost certainly seen it, but it is a fresco in the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican.
And imagine a really classical looking kind of square, like a city square that has in the background doorways that are kind of infinitely receding.
It's not actually infinite because on the last one, you can see the sky in the background, but there's one huge kind of arched doorway.
And in this square that's ahead of all of these doorways, and they're big in the background, kind of marble classical statues.
They're all wearing very kind of traditional kind of draped clothing that gives that classical feel.
And you've got different... clusters of philosophers in different parts of the square.
Today we're going to be talking about the painting by Raphael, who's a very famous Renaissance painter.
He's more or less considered to be kind of part of the Holy Trinity of the Renaissance artists.
So you have Raphael, and then you have Michelangelo, and you have Leonardo da Vinci, who were all contemporaries of one another and who did not like one another very much.
And today we're going to talk about the painting that is known to us as School of Athens.
And so we'll start by talking a little bit about who Raphael was and his biography.
Actually, now that I think about it, first let's maybe talk about what the painting looks like.
You've almost certainly seen it, but it is a fresco in the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican.
And imagine a really classical looking kind of square, like a city square that has in the background doorways that are kind of infinitely receding.
It's not actually infinite because on the last one, you can see the sky in the background, but there's one huge kind of arched doorway.
And in this square that's ahead of all of these doorways, and they're big in the background, kind of marble classical statues.
They're all wearing very kind of traditional kind of draped clothing that gives that classical feel.
And you've got different... clusters of philosophers in different parts of the square.
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