Raffaello Sanzio (1483–1520) was born in Urbino, the son of an Umbrian painter, and trained in Perugino's workshop. In 1508 Pope Julius II commissioned the twenty-five-year-old Raphael to fresco a set of private library rooms in the Vatican — the Stanze. This brought him into indirect competition with Michelangelo, who was beginning the Sistine ceiling at the same moment.

The School of Athens is one wall of the first of those rooms — the *Stanza della Segnatura* — designed as the pope's high tribunal chamber. The opposite wall carries *La Disputa* (Christian theology); the two adjacent walls represent Justice and Poetry. The School of Athens stands for 'Philosophy' in this scheme. At the centre Plato (gesturing upward, holding his *Timaeus*) and Aristotle (gesturing downward, holding the *Ethics*) walk side by side. The surrounding figures are largely identifiable: Socrates counting on his fingers at the left, Pythagoras writing in the foreground, Euclid drawing with a compass on the right, and at the far right edge Raphael himself, looking out at the viewer.

Striking is that Plato and Aristotle bear the faces of contemporaries: Plato is generally accepted as a portrait of Leonardo da Vinci, and the brooding figure leaning on a marble block in the foreground (Heraclitus) is taken to be Michelangelo. Raphael added this last figure later, after seeing the unveiled portions of the Sistine — the addition is visible in restoration as a slightly different layering of the marble's plasterwork.

The architectural setting evokes the new St Peter's Basilica then rising in Rome under Bramante — broad, classical, with great vaulted arches. Antique philosophy and the rebuilt Christian Rome are visually fused.

The fresco was completed in 1511 and has remained on the same wall for over five centuries. Successive restorations through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reworked its surface; the 1996–2003 campaign brought the underlying colours back into clearer focus.