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Hello, despite the not unimpressive feat of commissioning the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Pope Julius II is better known as a warrior than a scholar.

But when he 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' private library.

The School of Athens depicts an imaginary scene in which philosophers of several eras are gathered together at the centre 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 paying and pack would 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 our Enries, Renaissance scholar and senior member of the language department at the School of Economic Science,

Joel Crowley, Professor of History of Renaissance Philosophy and Librarian at the Warburg Institute at the University of London,

and Angie Hobbs, Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Warwick. Angie Hobbs, can you describe the painting for us?

Well, we're invited into this sumptuously vaulted classical interior. The architecture is Roman not Greek and I'm sure we'll be coming back to that.

And the eye is led to this triumphal style arch at the far end leading to blue sky beyond. And then beautifully orchestrated around this interior,

we have mainly groups of largely Greek philosophers and intellectuals, standing, sitting, discussing with each other, some listening.

Plato and Aristotle, as you've mentioned, we also have Socrates, Epicurus, Hippacia.

There are a couple of lone figures. We've got Heraclitus brooding and solitary splendor, and we've also got Dijonis the cynic who loved flouting convention,

and he's sort of loosely sprawling on the steps with his robes in a state of disarray. So we have this wonderful, sort of vibrant, vivid intellectual scene.

And we look, I'm looking at a rather poor print of it, I'm afraid, at the moment. And the only men, they're all men, are in the bottom, almost the bottom third.

So the thing is a vast edifice. It's the edifice. The place itself is very, very important, isn't it? The vaults, the three arches, the great statues, which are bigger than any of the philosophers.

So can you describe, can you give us a view as to why I think Raphael put so much effort into the space, the place?

Yes, we've got, well, we've got all these Roman echoes, as I've said, we've got echoes of the bards of Dijon, we've got echoes of the pantheon,

there's a statue of Apollo and Athena in her Roman guise as Minerva. Now it's going to be an interesting question.

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