The School of Plato
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The School of Plato () is a work by Jean Delville.
In 1895 Delville won the Belgian Prix de Rome, and went with his family to Italy. While there, he painted The School of Plato which is now in the Museé d’Orsay in Paris. This work was greeted with great enthusiasm when it went on display in Brussels in 1898. Its colours are predominantly cool, emphasizing blues, greens and tans, with touches of purple. Plato, whose philosophy Delville greatly admired, sits in the centre of a beautiful but artificial classical landscape, disseminating wisdom to a group of twelve male pupils. He is bearded and Christ-like, and this association is not a coincidence. According to both Schuré and Blavatsky, Plato had been initiated, but instead of speaking openly, he disguised the esoteric truths and put them into a rational, intellectual form which could be taught publicly.
In Delville’s painting, Plato is draped, but all of his students are nude. Looking at them, people tend to be struck by their oddly effeminate appearance. This is not a homoerotic scene, however, even if it looks like one. Delville’s aim was to represent the disciples as androgynous. According to Plato, and later esoteric systems such as Theosophy, primordial humans had once been hermaphrodites. In Delville’s day, many people believed that the more spiritual human types were already beginning to return to that state. The androgyny of Plato’s disciples is thus a sign of their purity and evolution towards divinity.
