The Raphael World Tour:

Celebrating its Tenth Year

The Raphael World Tour began in May 1997 in Rome and is directed toward seeing all the works by the great master.  The tour has taken Fenton and me to churches and museums in Rome, Florence (the Uffizi and the Pitti Palace), Urbino (Raphael’s home town), Bologna, Milan, Brescia, Bergamo, Paris (the Louvre), London (The National Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum), Munich, Vienna, Budapest, Dresden, Berlin, and Montreal (a traveling exhibit from Budapest). On the domestic front, there have been trips to the museums of New York (the Met), Washington D.C. (the National Art Gallery), Boston (the Gardner), Baltimore, Glens Falls, Indianapolis, and Raleigh.

My favorite Raphael work is the School of Athens, found in the Stanza Della Signatura, the Raphael Rooms, in the Vatican. I find this fresco fascinating on a number of levels. The depth and architectural style of the painting is incredible. I love the subject matter, the great thinkers of medieval and ancient science sharing their philosophies and perspectives. I love the fact that Raphael used his contemporaries as the models for the great thinkers. In the center, there is Plato who bears an uncanny resemblance to Leonardo DaVinci and in the foreground is Michelangelo, as Heraclitus. Interestingly, in the cartoon of this painting, in Milan, a full scale pencil drawing, Michelangelo is not present. On the right, as you view the painting, Raphael has placed himself in the painting, looking back at those viewing his art. The fresco has the further virtue of representing the disputes that have animated political science for well over half a century. In the center of the painting, Plato points to the sky and the spiritual and normative views, while Aristotle’s palm is turned down, directed toward the ground and the empirical.

The School of Athens is just one part of the breathtaking room, which includes the Disputa, the Dispute over the Sacrament, and Mount Parnassus (below), a fresco of Apollo, the great poets (like Homer, Horace, and Sappho) and the Muses.

The ceiling of the room glorifies the four branches of learning necessary for a complete general education: Jurisprudence, Theology, Philosophy, and Poetry.

Jurisprudence Theology

Philosophy Poetry

In the Summer of 2007, I finally made it to Dresden. Dresden was devastated by Allied bombers in World War II, but it has rebuilt to its past glory. And at the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, I saw the greatest Madonna of them all, the Sistine Madonna. This is a very mature work by Raphael. The looks on the faces of the baby Jesus and Mary are very different from the usual Madonnas that Raphael created.

The Raphael World Tour continues to Madrid, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Naples, Amsterdam, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Los Angeles, and Pasadena.

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