Francesco Salviati et la bella maniera: Actes des colloques de Rome et de Paris (1998). Catherine Monbeig Goguel , Philippe Costamagna , Michel Hochmann
Vitruvius and also the performance of Greek dramas. The grand classical settings for Raphael's pictures reflect this academic interest in Vitruvian architecture. Raphael depicts the heroes of classical learning in rhetorical postures within the all'antica scenography in a dramatic, painted language that Inghirami may well have orchestrated in part. Joost-Gaugier, who is known for her previous articles on the uomini famosi series of the Quattrocento, conceives of the stanza iconography as a rich elaboration upon the earlier cycles of famous men included in humanist studioli and libraries, particularly the Montefeltro studiolo at Urbino. In Raphael's four major wall frescoes, however, the famous men of the past leave their rigid portrait stances and adopt dramatic positions in quasi-theatrical presentations concerning the nature of the disciplines of the humanistic education program. Although the tituli of the earlier cycles have been abandoned, Raphael's actors are intended, as Joost-Gaugier argues, to be recognizable by the parts they play as personifications of the knowledge imparted through their treatises. These representatives of classical empiricism (Aristotle), mathematics (Euclid), and so on, gesture to each other in ways that reflect the connections between their philosophical and intellectual achievements. Each figure thus has only one specific identity. For example, Joost-Gaugier has convincingly identified the figures surrounding Euclid in Raphael's School of Athens as the mathematician-astronomer Ptolemy and the famous geographer Strabo. Ptolemy and Strabo would be understood to be closely allied to Euclid because the sciences of astronomy and geography were dependent on geometry, personified by Euclid. Joost-Gaugier posits that the spectator, in turn, was intended to ponder the association between one influential thinker and another. In the process, the solemn, still dramas would effectively be brought to life through a meditative exercise analogous to the patterns of reading within the humanist curriculum that the papal library embodied. CATHLEEN HOENIGER Queen's University, Kingston, Canada