Here is an article we uncovered that received little attention in mainstream academia.
This pictorial with brief commentary was found in AC 9.5.
Commentary: Plato (the elder one, pointing up at his Forms) and Aristotle occupy the center of the picture as the greatest Athenian philosophers. Socrates is notoriously ugly, which makes Alcibiades’ passionate attraction to him all that more remarkable. Alcibiades, the hot-headed youth is out of place here among philosophers. Averroës, the 12th century AD Arabic scholar from Spain is this painting’s most wild anachronism. Pythagoras, perhaps more legendary than historical, gave Plato the notion that mathematics underlie all reality.
Hypatia (Alexandria, 5th AD) needed to be snuck into this Renaissance work of art, for the story goes that she was dragged to death, or torn to pieces, by a mob of Christian monks because she was a mathematician, a neo-Platonist philosopher and a woman. At first Pope Julius II objected to Hypatia’s inclusion. So Raphael refigured her to look like Julius’ nephew, a teenager, lightened her skin, and said the effeminate-looking figure in white was a portrait of Julius’ nephew, meant as a tribute to the Pope.
Parmenides and Heraclitus were two pre-Socratic philosophers who are said to have had a big effect on Plato. The former said that all reality is really one unchanging thing, and the latter said that all reality is constantly in a state of flux. So Plato said the world is ever changing, and not real, but some higher reality exists as a unity and never changes. Heraclitus looks a lot like Michelangelo.
Diogenes the Cynic lounges by himself. He acquired his “freedom” by flouting all social customs and renouncing ambition. Euclid near him is working out a geometry problem.
Zoroaster is Greek for Zarathustra. An Iranian from perhaps 1000 B.C., he is credited with founding Zoroastrianism. Over time legends about him grew. Raphael thought of him as a sage and magus who wrote learned works of philosophy and theology. He holds a celestial sphere. Facing him is Ptolemy with a sphere of the planet earth which he held to lie at the center of the universe.
Epicurus with his back to the viewer presented the most significant challenge to Platonism in antiquity. He solved the problem of unity and change by saying that everything was made of atoms, and they were continuously combining and rearranging themselves to make up things. The atom itself, though, was unchanging, eternal and pure. Epicureans avoided pain above all, and enjoyed themselves thoroughly discussing philosophy in their gardens.