He does not look at what he writes, perhaps demonstrating his distrust of sight as a source of knowledge. Heraclitus writes, left hand lifted to support his downturned head while, beneath the quill in his right hand, the top right corner of his paper curls upwards. The two figures’ activities are linked too. The ink pot at Heraclitus coiled left elbow teeters pictorially off the back corner of the carved block that serves as his desk, finally resting on the very step that, farther to the right, also bears Diogenes’ cup. One figure’s pose inverts the other’s: Heraclitus’ bent limbs curl inwards towards his torso, whereas Diogenes’ splayed legs and supporting left elbow open up Heraclitus’ inward turn. While Plato and Aristotle actively debate their respective points of view, the former pointing upwards towards an unseen ideal while the latter gestures down towards the earth’s essential materiality, Heraclitus and Diogenes are each more isolated from the convivial debates taking place around them, the two mirroring one another in their solitude. Together these two philosophers bracket the path approached by the paired central figures of Plato and Aristotle as they walk together towards the painted hall’s foreground. Here I argue that this figure’s visual dissonance within the larger composition can be productively understood if we acknowledge the seated man as the pictorial partner to Diogenes the Cynic of Sinope, who sits reading a couple of steps above. Nonetheless, the question of Michelangelo’s painted presence in the School of Athens aside, the oversize and solitary figure of Heraclitus remains intriguing visually. Still, true or not, the story continues to circulate unrestrainedly , and many viewers today still clearly want to believe it. Loh is at pains to debunk this identification, pointing out that “this precious myth is a modern invention first proposed in 1941 by Deocleo Redig de Campos.” based on what Loh clearly considers insufficient evidence. The young Raphael was so impressed by what he saw Michelangelo painting, the story goes, that he paid homage to the older artist by inserting Michelangelo’s “likeness … represented in Michelangelo’s style” into the foreground of his first major painting for their common patron, Pope Julius II. In what Maria Loh calls “one of the best-loved stories of Renaissance art history ,” this late addition is identified not only as the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, but also as Michelangelo who was painting in the nearby Sistine Chapel at the very time that Raphael was painting the School of Athens in the Stanza della Segnatura. Indeed, there is no question that the oversize brown-haired man was added to the composition late: he does not appear in the fresco’s final preparatory drawing or cartoon, now in Milan, and in fact is painted on a piece of plaster laid in after the original smooth intonaco surface had dried. The sole pictorial flourish in the seated man’s depiction, a small swag of drapery of uniformly purplish tones, appears to overlap the long blue-highlighted folds of his neighbor’s rose-toned, gold-edged toga painted in glorious colore cangiante. His lack of groundedness contrasts with the weightiness of his closest neighbor, who stands with left foot firmly planted on a rough-hewn block of marble. His position seems off-kilter too: in this crisply conceived perspectival space, he does not so much sit as hover before an undefined swath of painted grey that truncates the pavement’s nested-square pattern beneath or behind his right thigh, and that lacks the top and bottom moldings seen on each riser of the scene’s wide steps. The stony block that serves as the dark-haired man’s desk is turned against the prevailing orthogonal of the scene’s insistent single-point perspective. The other figures in the composition are shoeless or shod in sandals or Roman soldier’s footgear, tied at mid-calf, of the type seen in the Arch of Constantine and later engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi. The dark-haired seated man wears a broad-yoked tunic that seems to open in the front, its shirt-tail ends parting over his knees, and plain high boots. He seems colossal in size, especially when compared with his neighbor who stands to his immediate right, holding a book in one hand while pointing out a passage to his companions with the other. The burly dark-haired man with downcast eyes in the foreground of the School of Athens draws our attention for a number of reasons.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |