Raphael · 1509–11
The School of Athens
Posters from $10.82 USD · Canvas from $28.14 USD
Ships anywhere in the USA
Raphael's monumental Vatican fresco — Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Pythagoras and the great philosophers gathered under classical arches. The Renaissance ideal in one room.
Up to 15.5 × 12 in · landscape
Size
Larger sizes are unavailable for this painting because the source scan's resolution wouldn't print at gallery quality.
Format & finish
Archival cotton canvas stretched over a wooden frame. Ready to hang as-is. No external frame.
Scale next to a 5'10" person
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Materials & quality
›Canvas & inks
Giclée-printed on archival cotton canvas with fade-resistant pigment inks, hand-stretched over wooden bars. Gallery-wrapped — ready to hang with no extra frame needed.
›Floater frame
Hand-finished solid wood floater frame in five finishes. The canvas sits inside with a clean shadow gap — the way galleries hang contemporary canvas.
›Posters
Premium archival paper — 200 gsm soft matte or 230 gsm vibrant glossy. Ships flat or rolled, ready for your own frame.
›Faithful to the source
Printed from the highest-resolution museum and archive scans available. Each painting's maximum size is capped at what its source scan can support at gallery quality.
The story of The School of Athens
Under a series of enormous barrel vaults, Plato and Aristotle walk toward you down a flight of steps, one pointing up and one holding his hand flat over the earth, while every thinker of the ancient world argues, writes, measures, and sulks around them. Pythagoras works at a slate, Euclid bends over a compass, Diogenes sprawls on the stairs, and a brooding figure in the foreground was added late and given Michelangelo's face. Raphael painted it between 1509 and 1511 on a wall of the pope's private library in the Vatican, and he put himself in at the far right, looking out.
On a wall, The School of Athens is warm stone and architecture. The dominant colors are the gold and cream of the vaults, a pale blue sky at the back, and the reds, blues, and ochres of the robes scattered through the crowd. It suits a study, a library, a home office, a dining room, or a stairwell, and it fits classic, academic, and traditional interiors, and any room with books in it. It is a wide image with more than fifty faces, so the detail matters. We offer it up to the Small at 15.5 × 12 in, the size for a wall above a desk or a hall table; the Petite at 14.2 × 11 in works in a pair with another Vatican fresco.
Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam was being painted on a ceiling nearby at the same time. Raphael's The Transfiguration is his last work, and The Sistine Madonna is his gentlest. More from Raphael.
Printed in our studio from a public-domain photograph of the fresco, with the warm stone tones held to the Vatican reference.
Raphael
Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, now generally known in English as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form, ease of composition, and visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur. Together with Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, he forms the traditional trinity of great masters of that period.
All Raphael prints →Biography adapted from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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