School of Athens

This is the outcome of an assignment in one of my drawing classes: to copy and abstract a Renaissance painting. I chose Raphael's School of Athens at the Vatican from a photograph in H. W. Janson's History of Art. Looking at it some forty years later, my depiction of the painting's architecture (a reference to the new St. Peter's basilica) does not really look very abstract. A detail of a 27" by 20" acrylic painting on illustration board, done Spring, 1971. I photographed it at an angle to exaggerate the vertical perspective.