As Raphael began to assemble his heady cast of anachronistic characters, the monumental muddle that might result must have seemed more and more pronounced. A puzzling throng of ambiguous figures splashing around in a soup of anonymous thought wouldn’t do. Sure, it might at first seem simple enough to tell the elder Plato from his student Aristotle, as the pair sashay in their scholarly way down the steps at the centre of the painting. After all, Plato is packing a copy of his treatise on the nature of man’s existence in the physical world, the Timaeus, while Aristotle awkwardly wields an instalment of his 10-volume Nicomachean Ethics. But forcing observers of the work to squint at the spine of hefty tomes shoved cumbersomely into the hands of each and every figure in the painting would have weighed the work down with tediously tweedy detail.
At some point in assembling his School, Raphael appears to have realised that establishing static and easily distinguishable identities for his celebrated students was the wrong approach. He should instead embrace the inevitable confusion, overtly invite a sense of irresolvable flux, and thereby make the indeterminacy of identity itself the very philosophy of his portrait of philosophy. (Read more.)
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