By the 1500s, many artists had mastered the new system of using perspective. When a young artist named Raphael was hired to paint a fresco on a wall of the library at St. Peter’s Church in Rome, he was excited to show off this technique.
From our point of view, when we look at School of Athens (top of page) it is hard to tell where the real architecture ends and the painted arches begin. It is as if we are looking through the wall it is painted on and into the next room. In that room are some of the great thinkers of history who inspired Raphael, including the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle in the center.
Raphael used one-point perspective to compose this work. The lines on the floor tiles and the pillars converge at a single vanishing point on the horizon line. It is between Plato’s and Aristotle’s heads (see diagram above). The converging lines also draw our attention to the two figures. Even though they are painted smaller and with less detail than the figures in the foreground (the closest area to the viewer), we can still tell they are the most important.
School of Athens is considered one of the best examples of linear perspective. For more than 500 years, artists have continued to use the techniques developed during the Renaissance. Today artists like Richard Estes play with these techniques to create even more realistic scenes than thought possible in Raphael’s time.