Lives of the Eminent Philosophers

by Pamela Mensch

  The printed editions of Traversari have been consulted more often than the manuscripts, but what most readers seem to have been devouring in Renaissance Rome are various vernacular Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, preserved in manuscript or printed in small octavo format on cheap paper. These books all show signs of heavy use, and not only because the paper on which they are printed is cheaper than the stock used for printed quarto versions of Diogenes. Their texts are designed for easy reading and maximum amusement.

  The earliest of these popular digests is a thirteenth-century compendium of short biographies and adages known as the Fiori e vita di filosafi e d’altri savi e d’imperadori, once attributed to Dante’s teacher Brunetto Latini. The book certainly dates from his time: it is a translation of Adam of Clermont’s popular Latin booklet Flores historiarum, executed between 1271, when Adam completed his Flores, and 1276, the date of the earliest surviving manuscript of the Fiori.4 A slightly later work known as Vite dei filosofi translated a Liber de vita et moribus philosophorum that was formerly attributed to the English Scholastic philosopher Walter Burley (1276–1345).5 This Vite is now thought to have been taken directly from a twelfth-century Latin translation of Diogenes that was drafted by the (probably) Sicilian scholar Enrico Aristippo between 1154 and 1162, but is now lost.6 Both these works, in vernacular Italian, provide short biographies of the philosophers together with pungent aphorisms, and the stories they tell are a far cry from Raphael’s dignified conclave: Diogenes Laertius speaks of Diogenes the Cynic trampling the carpets in Plato’s house as a rebuke to his arrogance; in the digests, he jumps up and down on Plato’s couch with muddy feet. Diogenes Laertius tells several stories about Socrates’ wife, Xanthippe, but in the two later versions of the Lives Socrates has become a bigamist, whose wives pull each other’s hair when they meet, and all over “such a dirty man, who had slack, hollow nostrils, a bald forehead, hairy shoulders and crooked legs.”7 Raphael has smoothed out his satyrlike features and provided the deliberately rude Diogenes with the body and reclining pose of a river-god. The painting’s mood overall is genteel and exalted, emphasizing the energy of the philosophers, rather than their contentiousness.

  At least one of the readers of the Vatican Library’s early printed editions of Diogenes Laertius was Angelo Colocci, the Curial humanist known to have worked closely with Raphael.8 Inc.III.83 is a copy of the Latin translation of Diogenes made by Elio Francesco Marchese, published in Rome by Giorgio Lauer in 1472 and dedicated to the Neapolitan cardinal Oliviero Carafa.9 Originally owned by another cardinal, it passed into the hands of Colocci, who peppered the margins, especially of the Life of Plato, with notes and the word lists he called “tabulation.”10 There are also significant annotations in Inc.III.172, the Venice edition of Traversari’s translation published by Nicholas Jenson in 1480; some of these appear to be Colocci’s as well.

  The School of Athens, by Raphael, 1509–1510.

  Colocci and Raphael studied the architectural treatises of Vitruvius together, and from this collaboration we know the painter may not have had a scholar’s command of Latin but could make out enough to warrant owning his own Latin books (as did his similarly “unlettered” associates Donato Bramante and the brothers Antonio and Giovanni Battista da Sangallo, all of whom owned Latin copies of Vitruvius).11 Even an artist who claimed no knowledge of Latin, Leonardo da Vinci, owned his own copy of Traversari’s translation.12 A double portrait painted in Milan in the 1490s shows Leonardo playing a scowling, lantern-jawed Heraclitus to Bramante’s jolly, balding Democritus; both hold books, as the earth hangs suspended between them. This phenomenally intelligent and influential pair were great readers despite their shared lack of expertise as classicists.13

  But Greek manuscripts of Diogenes were also available in Rome (though those in the Vatican Library did not arrive until after Raphael’s time). The Biblioteca Angelica preserves a sixteenth-century text on paper (MS gr. 97), part of a significant collection of Greek philosophical works assembled in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries by the Augustinian friar Egidio da Viterbo, the thinker whose ideas almost certainly govern the basic design and many details of The School of Athens, including the very presence of a conclave of Greek philosophers on the wall of the pontifical suite.14

  Two years before assigning Raphael to work on The School of Athens, in 1506, Pope Julius II had appointed Egidio, a famous preacher and vicar-general of his order, as vicar-general of the Augustinian Hermits, the largest religious order in the early-sixteenth-century Christian world.15 In 1507, the order itself elected him prior-general. Through sermons, pastoral letters, and a large unfinished theological treatise, and with the Pope’s full encouragement, Egidio took a preeminent role in shaping the intellectual climate of Julian Rome, including a special emphasis on the study of Greek and Hebrew, the two other “theological languages” along with Latin.16 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Christian Kabbalah shaped Egidio’s Hebrew studies, Marsilio Ficino his understanding of the Greeks.17 For the most part, Egidio wrote notes in the margins of his books in the same language as the text itself, whether vernacular Italian, Latin, Greek, or Hebrew. This is the case for his copy of Diogenes Laertius, commissioned from the Florentine scribe Niccolò Puccini.18

  Diogenes Laertius, by presenting ancient philosophy as a group of competitive schools, portrayed a world of learning that had much in common with sixteenth-century Rome. Initially trained in the Averroist Aristotelian tradition at the University of Padua (where he met Pico in the early 1490s), Egidio had become increasingly entranced by Ficino’s version of Platonic philosophy after meeting the philosopher-physician in Florence. In effect, therefore, the struggles among Platonist, Stoic, Cynic, Pythagorean, and Epicurean in antiquity mirrored the struggles of his time, and The School of Athens responds precisely as Egidio tried to do in his own ministry: reconciling the disputants by appealing to their common beliefs, finding the harmonies between Plato and Aristotle, and among all their eccentric, opinionated fellow seekers after truth.

  In addition to sermons and pastoral letters, Egidio hoped to effect this reconciliation among contemporary philosophical schools in a more trenchant, quiet way, by producing an ambitious work of scholarship. Between 1506 and 1512, in the very years that Raphael created The School of Athens, he began to draft a commentary on his era’s standard theological textbook, the Quattuor libri sententiarum (Four Books of Sentences), drafted between 1148 and 1151 by the Dominican friar (and future bishop of Paris) Peter Lombard. Commenting on the Sentences, basic Church doctrine rendered in question-and-answer form with Scholastic precision, quickly became a standard thesis topic for university students from Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas in the fourteenth century to Giordano Bruno in the sixteenth. Egidio da Viterbo’s work differed from these exercises by abandoning the Scholastic question-and-answer format. In his authoritative position he had unusual freedom, and so he wrote about this most Aristotelian of texts “according to the mind of Plato,” responding to Lombard’s questions and distinctions with classical myths and transcendent Ideas, using Ficino’s commentaries on Plato and the example of his order’s legendary founder, Saint Augustine.19 This mixture of pagan and Christian was perfectly admissible, Egidio says at various points in his Commentary, because the ancient gods were nothing other than guardian angels, and the stories the ancients told about the gods and heroes were ultimately rooted in sound Christian theology.20

  Egidio’s marginal notes to the manuscript of Diogenes Laertius show he examined the lives of the ancient philosophers in the same accepting, open-minded spirit, seeking out parallels between their beliefs and the tenets of Christianity. His foremost example, naturally, is Plato, whose life he sets off by drawing delicate flourishes before and after the chapter, with red tendrils and leaves; he also decorates the capital pi of Plato’s name with minute red hatching.21

  Egidio’s thinking about antiquity and theology captivated Pope Julius, who repeatedly made use of the preacher’s eloquence to
justify his own actions as pope to the public, in Rome and elsewhere in Italy; Julius himself was famously laconic.22 But he also drew on an idea Egidio distilled in a sermon of 1507: that Rome, here and now, was at last fulfilling a long-standing destiny, conceived by God at the beginning of time, to become the capital of a spiritual as well as a temporal state.23

  In 1508, Pope Julius called on Raphael and Michelangelo to commit this supernal vision to frescoes that would enshrine and describe in detail the luminous inspiration behind his notoriously vigorous papacy. Michelangelo was assigned to replace the starry blue ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in 1508; he protested that he was a sculptor, not a painter, but Julius insisted. In the same year, Raphael began work on his first fresco in the papal suite, the Triumph of Theology, usually known as the Disputa del Sacramento.24

  The choice of Michelangelo to proclaim the face of the Church in public and Raphael in private is telling. Both painters express the grandeur of the Pope’s ambitions and Egidio da Viterbo’s theological vision, but Raphael takes a more intimate view of these subjects, and the cunning of his composition rewards close scrutiny.

  The School of Athens presents the Greek philosophers through the eyes of a strong-willed, far-seeing pope steeped in contemporary humanist scholarship and theology—the work of Egidio da Viterbo above all, but also Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, as well as Giovanni Gioviano Pontano in Naples.25 For all these figures, Hebrew wisdom and Greek philosophy marked essential steps of a universal human progress toward a Christian enlightenment in which the various ancient philosophical schools would amend their differences to create a systematic, effectively Neoplatonic theology. Egidio was not the only contemporary to assert that under Julius II a new stage of fulfillment had been reached. In an oration in the Sistine Chapel on January 1, 1508, Giovanni Battista Casali, a professor at the University of Rome, called Rome itself a “new Athens,” come to rescue Greece from the Ottoman Turks through its cultivation of Greek learning on Italian soil; no more powerful weapon against the infidel existed, he declared, than the Vatican Library.26 In many ways, therefore, Raphael’s School of Athens is also a School of Rome, beginning with the grand structure that houses the philosophers under a dome that looks so much like Donato Bramante’s new plans for St. Peter’s Basilica, another of the epochal projects that began in the pontificate of Julius II.27

  Contemporary descriptions of The School of Athens do not survive; the first detailed discussions of its meaning are those of Giorgio Vasari in 1550 and 1568, and, more than a century later (1672), of Giovanni Pietro Bellori.28 Some of the figures in the fresco are clearly recognizable and have been confidently accepted for centuries; others are harder to identify and have stimulated learned debate since the late sixteenth century. Among these, however, some general outlines may be discerned.

  To Egidio da Viterbo, Greek philosophy’s greatest contribution to Christian theology was to lay the foundations for the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.29 Plato’s Timaeus expressed the idea most concisely, but Egidio also detected glimmerings of trinitarian thought in ancient myths, whether in triads like the Three Graces, or the Three Fates, or in stories of love bridging the gap between mortal and immortal, like Diana’s romance with Endymion, or Anchises’ with Venus, or the endless loves of Jupiter, or in tales of heroic suffering and redemption—those of Hercules, Orpheus, or Philoctetes.30 Indeed, triplets and triangles pervade Raphael’s composition, from the three large apertures in the great building in which the philosophers gather, to the tripartite window in its dome, to the three fictive relief plaques that decorate its walls.31

  Within this great three-in-one structure, Plato and Aristotle dominate the composition, Plato carrying a copy of his Timaeus and Aristotle a copy of the Ethics, both labeled in vernacular Italian so there can be no mistake about who is who. Raphael shows Plato as an old, bearded man, Aristotle as a handsome, athletic figure in the prime of life.32 Egidio’s Commentary on Peter Lombard says repeatedly that “these two great princes [of philosophy] can be reconciled,” and here their compatible, harmonious postures bear out this belief. The Commentary cites Aristotle’s statement, preserved in Diogenes, that friends are one soul in two bodies, and something of that fellow feeling is also portrayed.

  As for the books they carry, Egidio writes:

  These great Princes can be reconciled, if we postulate that things have a dual nature, one that is free from matter and one that is embedded in matter…. Plato follows the former and Aristotle the latter, and because of this these great leaders of Philosophy hardly dissent from one another. If we seem to be making this up, listen to the Philosophers themselves. For if we are speaking about humanity, which is, after all, the subject under discussion, Plato says the same thing; he says that humankind is Soul in the Alcibiades, and in the Timaeus, that humankind has two natures, and we know one of these [natures] by means of the sense, the other by means of reason. Also, in the same book he teaches that each part of us does not occur in isolation; rather, each nature cares for the other nature. Aristotle, in the tenth book of the Ethics, calls humankind Understanding. Thus you may know that each Philosopher feels the same way, however much it seems to you that they are not saying the same thing.33

  Plato’s upraised finger indicates God’s celestial location and his oneness; Aristotle gestures toward the philosophers gathered on the steps below them as well as to the viewer, implying with the sweep of his hand that ethical conduct conveys the spirit of divine unity to the troubled multiplicity of human affairs.

  The Princes of Philosophy divide Raphael’s fresco in two. The left-hand side belongs to Plato and the statue of Apollo, the right to Aristotle and the statue of Minerva. Both deities, according to Egidio’s Commentary, are prefigurations of Christ, Apollo for his association with light and Minerva for her supernatural birth from the head of Jupiter:

  In the sixth book of the Republic, Plato introduces the begetter, the father, and finally the son, whom at one point he calls the Sun shining outward, and at another Minerva—broadly, inwardly wise; in the Symposium he amply praises the third Person, calling it now Venus, now Love. He was in the habit of calling the twin gifts of the divine Child now Minerva, or wisdom, and now the Sun, or light. The one child shines brilliant in himself; the other makes plain the way to the Highest Good by means of reason.34

  By carrying his lyre, Apollo reminds us that he is the god of music, and on the wall next to him Raphael has painted Mount Parnassus; the two themes of philosophy and poetry thus merge beautifully. Minerva, who stands above a relief plaque with an image of Reason, flanks the wall on which Raphael has painted scenes of civil and canon law beneath images of three cardinal virtues; the fourth, Justice, is implicit, as Plato’s Republic says, where Fortitude, Temperance, and Prudence are found.35

  On the level beneath these two “princes,” snub-nosed Socrates (miraculously younger than his student Plato) holds forth to a small crowd; the handsome soldier in dress armor is most likely Xenophon, whom Diogenes describes as “modest and extraordinarily handsome” (2.48), rather than the equally handsome but dissolute and decidedly unphilosophical Alcibiades. Xenophon appears much younger than Socrates (as was true in life), just as Aristotle is shown above them as much younger than his mentor Plato. There is no way to maintain a pattern of relative ages when the philosophers in The School of Athens span so many centuries, so instead Raphael seems to concentrate on consistency within the smaller groupings.

  On a level below Socrates we can recognize Pythagoras by his relation to the tablet with a musical diagram of the diapason, held up by an angelic youth as the philosopher writes.36 His presence beneath Apollo fits well with the description Diogenes gives of him (8.11), where his bearing “is said to have been highly dignified, and his students held the opinion about him that he was Apollo come down from the Hyperboreans.”

  Pinning down an identity for most of the other philosophers on this side of the fresco is difficult, because there are so many contenders for
so few prominent positions. Is the elderly man peering over the shoulder of Pythagoras one of his close followers, or Empedocles, clad in Raphael’s version of the “purple robe and golden sash” that Diogenes ascribes to him (8.73)? Or is he simply a scholar in rapt concentration, the embodiment of all these philosophers at once? Which of the Arab commentators on Pythagoras is the turbaned figure who puts his hand on his heart, or is he all of them?

  Who is the gaunt, middle-aged man who gestures so emphatically to his own book? Egidio’s marginal notes in his copy of Diogenes reveal a particular interest in Zeno of Citium and Stoic philosophy; some of the ancient Greek’s statements about divinity come so close to Egidio’s own beliefs that he marks them off with a tiny drawing of the Cross on Mount Golgotha.37 This philosopher’s frowning expression fits well with Diogenes’ description of Zeno as “sullen and curt and of a shriveled countenance” (7.16).

  One other identification is reasonably secure, and it is a double portrait: the philosopher Epicurus bears the unmistakable features of Raphael’s friend, the papal librarian Tommaso Inghirami, nicknamed Fedra after his memorable student performance, circa 1486, as the lovelorn queen of Seneca’s tragedy. Inghirami preferred to style himself “Phaedrus,” in good Platonic form, but the feminine version of his ancient name is the one that stuck, among his contemporaries, and in the Inghirami family, which has produced generations of women named Fedra and men named Tommaso Fedra. Here the fat, brilliant bon vivant is cast, appropriately, as the most hedonistic of ancient philosophers, with whom he shared a passion for lovers of the same sex. As Diogenes writes (10.6):