The School of Athens was painted by twenty-seven year-old Raphael Sanzio for Pope Julius II (1503-1513). In 1508 Donato Bramante, the pope's architect, and also a native of Urbino, had recommended the young native of Urbino to Julius II. So enthusiastic was the pope when he saw the fresco that Raphael received the commission to paint the entire papal suite. The Stanza della Segnatura was to be Julius' library, Bibiotheca Iulia, which would house a small collection of books intended for his personal use.

The practice during Imperial Roman times of furnishing libraries with portraits of great poets was revived in fifteenth century Italy. Raphael revolutionized this practice in the Stanza by harmoniously arranging large groups of people as one unit in his fresco compositions. In the fresco of the School of Athens, sages from d

Pythagoras was a Greek philosopher and mathematician. Probably born in Samos, he settled in Croton (S Italy), where he established a community of followers who adhered to a way of life he prescribed. His school of philosophy reduced all meaning to numerical relationships and proposed that all existing objects are fundamentally composed of form and not material substance. The principles of Pythagoreanism, incl. belief in the immortality and reincarnation of the soul and in the liberating power of abstinence and asceticism, influenced the thought of Plato and Aristotle and contributed to the development of mathematics and Western rational philosophy. The proportions of musical intervals and scales were first studied by Pythagoras, and he was the first influential Western practitioner of vegetarianism. None of his writings survive, and it is difficult to distinguish the ideas he originated from those of his disciples. His memory is kept alive partly by the Pythagorean theorem, probably developed by his school after he died.

The new publication, Raphael's School of Athens, by Prof. Arnold Nesselrath, Director for Byzantine, Medieval and Modern Art, describes the details of the magnificent restoration he directed with the Vatican Museums restoration team led by Enrico Guidi. Several handprints that date from the time of the fresco's execution were found in an almost straight line across it at the height of the shafts of the pilasters. Although a detailed analysis of the fingerprints has not yet been undertaken, one hand must almost certainly be Raphael's. The others could belong to his assistants or to visitors on the scaffold. This discovery placed the artist and restorers into sudden communion. The generosity and vision of those who help conserve Raphael's art will enable us into the 21st century to still appreciate and be moved by his visual legacy.

ifferent epochs are arranged as colleagues in a timeless academy. Those that have been positively identified using accurate historical evidence are: Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Pythagoras, Euclid, Alcibiades, Diogenes, Ptolemy, Zoroaster and Raphael. Plato is in the center pointing his finger to the heavens while holding the Timaeus, his treatise on the origin of the world. Next to him, his younger pupil Aristotle holds a copy of his Ethics while describing the earth and the wide realm of moral teaching with his extended hand in an elegant horizontal gesture.

Epicurus was a Greek philosopher. His school in Athens, the Garden, competed with Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum. Several fundamental concepts characterize his philosophy. In physics, these are atomism, a mechanical conception of causality, limited by the idea of a spontaneous motion, or "swerve," of the atoms, which interrupts the necessary effect of a cause; the in

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