Raphael’s ‘School of Athens’ Comes Alive in Minnesota

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A couple years ago, Anthony Cunningham, chair of the philosophy department at the College of Saint Benedict and St. John’s University, and his wife, Mickey, a painter and art historian, were hosting a music night at their home. He’s a fiddler, Mickey sings and plays piano, and their daughters both play piano and guitar, he explains. They decided it would be amusing to create a tableau vivant, a living picture, of Jacques-Louis David’s “Oath of the Horatii.”

“It’s great fun,” Anthony Cunningham says in a phone interview. “If you don’t have a Paramount Pictures budget for all the right costumes, you have to improvise.”

Fast forward to the summer of 2010, when Cunningham was in Italy and Germany with some colleagues. They were visiting the Vatican Museums, and Cunningham saw Raphael’s early 16th-century masterpiece “The School of Athens,” a fresco celebrating the Greek philosophers. He’d seen reproductions of this group portrait of “the heavy-hitter intellectuals from the Western tradition,” he says, but was awed by its size and immediacy at the Vatican. “It’s far more stunning in the flesh.”

Speaking of flesh, Cunningham, remembering the David painting tableau of a couple of years earlier, mulled going a little more Cecil B. DeMille. “I thought, ‘this would be a great one to try.’” And who better, Cunningham thought, than MaryAnn Baenninger, a psychology and education scholar and president of St. Benedict’s, a women’s college, to personify the female mathematician and philosopher Hypatia?

Then it was “off to the races,” Cunningham recalls—trying to collect faculty, staff, and students for the project, with reactions ranging from eager to puzzled. The question “Why?” came up more than once, he says. His answer, in most cases, was that “the ultimate purpose will be to have a little fun.”

“It’s a little bit like a performance piece,” Cunningham says of finally assembling the 39 tableau performers, comprising about 16 faculty members, 16 students, five staff members, and a couple of children, all at a little spot called the Gathering Place, next to Saint Benedict’s Sacred Heart Chapel.

One challenge, of course, was costuming. Some folks brought their own, but Cunningham had assembled about 30 little grocery bags of improvised outfits with numbers corresponding to the fresco’s characters on a chart. He’d spent weeks scouring bargain counters at fabric stores, and eying sheets and table cloths. With evident pride he points out Alexander the Great’s helmet, which the careful observer may detect bears some resemblance to a spray-painted baseball helmet with the bill sawed off, a little foam insulation, and construction paper. Admire, too, the matching armor transformed with a bit of aluminum foil from a chest protector borrowed from the softball team.

There was, Cunningham says, a sudden awareness of square footage, particularly the lack of it from left to right (indeed, a few Greek greats had to be left out because of space considerations). Volunteers’ height, too, became a matter of concern. (Yo, Ptolemy! You’re blocking Zoroaster!)

Still, it all came off splendidly, as you can see from the accompanying photo and video. (Who’s who? The St. Could Times will help you with that and offers some other good photos too.) President Baenninger enjoyed the event so much she suggested to Cunningham that they make it a December tradition.
He demurs, saying it’s like eating a big meal—hard to imagine the next until he recovers from the last. But he thinks he’ll probably warm to the idea.
Might he look for a less ambitious artwork to vivify? Why not Géricault’s “The Raft of the Medusa” or Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware”? Cunningham jokes.

At least he seems to be joking. …
—Alexander C. Kafka