The Birth of Venus had the odd effect of making My Owner's knees go weak when she unexpectedly came upon it in the Uffizi Museum in Florence on her first trip to Italy. (Click here to read her account of that encounter) On her most recent trip to Rome she had another experience that came close. While on a guided tour of the Vatican Museums (which house some of the most valuable art in all the world) she entered the Raphael Room. There on one massive wall was the famous fresco, The School of Athens. Again a surprise.
She had been only slightly disappointed on her last trip by not getting to see it, but the Sistine Chapel can make up for a lot. This time she didn't give it a thought, so thrilled was she to be sharing all the beautiful treasures of history and art with her daughter. You could visit these museums many, many times and never see all that there is to see. Only moments before entering the room did the art professor traveling with her reveal what lay in store. She was even more excited than MO because on all her previous visits the guides had taken a short cut and she had never been to this room.
You enter the room through a door that is in the wall with the School of Athens on it, so you don't see it immediately. The first thing to strike MO about it was the size. You never get that from the pictures.
Here are the pictures MO took while in the room housing The School of Athens...
You can see the door they entered in at the bottom left of this picture.
In art books it comes across as a painting of large size but not big enough to fill an entire wall. The frescoes on the other walls are beautiful and stunning. Then you realize that everyone is turning around to look back from whence they came and...there it is.
My Owner immediately thought of her son, who is an artist and wished that he could be there to see this.
Click here to read the history of this painting and its artist.
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