Aristotle all dressed up

It's hard to credit that Raphael of Urbino has been dead for 500 years, because we can imagine meeting him swapping pigments with Michelangelo of Firenze and Leonardo of Vinci as they waited for the Pope to see them. The fact that Raphael died at the age of 37 from infection and bloodletting? Not so much.

One of Raphael's most notable and most copied works is his School of Athens which was commissioned by Pope Julius and executed on a wall in the Vatican between 1509 and 1511. It's BIG (5m x 7.7m) and detailed. The conceit was to represent the greatest thinkers of the Classical world as a reminder the papal court to do better. It was a massive cos-play for Raphael and his pals: discarding their doublets and cod-pieces and striking a pose wrapped in sheets or chitons. At the time, it would have been a hoot, because viewers could make facetious comments about their mate Michelangelo as . . . Heraclitus [bloborecent]. Those classically educated viewers would also have made a much better fist of recognising the iconography of the Ancients. My Mum got to be pretty good on the iconography of saints having spent her retirement years cruising between cathedrals and museums. Doing the who's who (both the philosophers and the models) on The School of Athens been an on-going puzzle for art-historians to wrestle over ever since. Here's one attempt - hint Geocentrist Ptolemy is holding the globe?

But, despite the skirts, they're all . . . men.

In our times there exists a self-appointed coven of crones Na Cailleacha who are venerable and arty and like to hang out together. I've mentioned cailleach as a slightly scary, respectful term for a generally undervalued segment of society. Tremble also at Sprakkar - an Icelandic equivalent. From Spring 2024, this collective decided that it would be grand jape to make a tableau vivant of The School of Athens with only women in the cos-play. Nice touches: replacing Euclid's chalk-board with a black laptop [above R]. Of course they strove to be consciously diverse and inclusive within the women space. Face it, they'd have been hard put to find 40 white Irish female philosophers, all available for a specific weekday morning in March, to populate their School of Hibernia.

And, contra Raphael and Julius II, an identification key has been included for posterity. They borrowed the Museum Building from TCD because of the steps and pilasters and put on a spiffy lunch so that everyone involved could mingle and network afterwards. Getting Mary Robinson, Ireland's first F Uachtarán, and Linda Doyle, TCD's first F Provost, to fill the robes of Plato and Aristotle was a coup. Some of the models have appeared in the Blob before. I haven't gotten round to writing up Dau.II's saxophone teacher / cailleach . . . yet. The fluffy white representations of Artemis/Diana/Medb and Athena/Minerva/Brigid/ standing on the newel posts at the rear are the work of Helen "Cailleach" Comerford who died suddenly a couple of weeks later
 
Here's a couple of minutes of RTE launching the project.