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Hello, despite the not unimpressive feet of commissioning the Sistine Chapel ceiling,

Pope Julius II is better known as a warrior than a scholar,

but when you did put down the sword and pick up a book,

he would have done so under a magnificent

if slightly unexpected fresco it's called the School of Athens it was painted by

Raphael in about 1509 and it sits in a room in the Vatican that housed Julius's private library.

The School of Athens depicts an imaginary scene in which philosophers of several eras are gathered

together at the Centest and Plato and Aristotle in discussion.

Plato is pointing at the sky and Aristotle at the ground.

In that pairing of gestures Raphael captured something essential about the

philosophers of these two men, but he also revealed much about

his own time that such a pagan pair could be found beside a Pope in private tells of

the complexity of intellectual life in the period in which classical learning was reborn in what we now call

the Renaissance. With me to discuss the School of Athens of Valerie Reese, Renaissance scholar and

senior member of the Language Department at the School of Economic Science,

Jule Kray, Professor of History

of the Renaissance Philosophy and Librarian at the Warburg Institute

at the University of London,

and Anjihob's Associate Professor in Philosophy

at the University of Warwick.

...