The galleries
What the tradition
made of itself.
The seven arts personified with their tools, the virtues with their emblems, the four temperaments at a game of cards — and one fresco read figure by figure. Every label carries its artist, its date, where the work hangs now, and what may be done with the picture of it. Choose a collection, then a work; its label opens beside it with a door to its place on the timeline, and the School of Athens opens figure by figure, from the list beneath it or on the picture itself.
Twenty-seven figures and details, as the Arts of Liberty gallery identifies them. Several have been read differently over the years, and where two readings are equally persuasive the label gives both. Choose one from the list below the picture, or — where the screen is wide enough to aim at a figure — on the picture itself. The arrow keys move between them.
Raphael, The School of Athens, 1511, Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican Museums. Public domain; from Wikimedia Commons.