By Theresa Rézeau 

At the centre of a vast Renaissance hall, two men walk towards us.

One is older, bearded and dressed in red and purple, raising a finger towards the heavens. Beside him, a younger man extends his hand towards the earth. Around them philosophers, mathematicians and scholars gather in conversation, calculation and argument. Some lean over books. Others draw diagrams. Figures speak across steps and marble floors while monumental arches carry the eye towards an open blue sky.

They are Plato and Aristotle, placed at the centre of The School of Athens, painted between 1509 and 1511 by the Italian High Renaissance painter and architect Raphael, Raffaello Sanzio (1483–1520), for the Vatican Palace.

More than five centuries later, the fresco is routinely called a masterpiece.

But what does that word actually mean?

We use it so easily that its meaning can disappear beneath the praise. Auction houses describe masterpieces before bidding begins. Museums announce them in exhibitions. Dealers use the word to distinguish exceptional works. Social media applies it to paintings completed yesterday. Almost anything sufficiently admired, expensive or visually arresting can acquire the title.

Yet masterpiece once meant something considerably more practical. Within the European guild tradition, a craftsman seeking recognition as a master could be required to produce a work demonstrating that he possessed the necessary skill. A master piece was evidence of competence, an object submitted to judgement before mastery could be recognised. The word began not with immortality, but with proof.

To call something a masterpiece today is to make a much larger claim. We are no longer simply saying that its maker knew how to make it. We are suggesting that the work has somehow exceeded competence and entered another category altogether.

Raphael’s fresco helps us understand the difficulty of defining that category. The scale of the gathering should produce confusion, yet Raphael gives it order. Groups form across the composition without becoming detached from the whole. The architecture directs our vision inward. The barrel vault and distant opening reinforce perspective lines that lead towards Plato and Aristotle. Bodies overlap without dissolving into a crowd, while gestures create smaller conversations within the larger one.

Even before we understand their philosophies, Raphael has made disagreement visible. Plato’s finger rises towards the realm of ideal forms; Aristotle’s hand extends towards the material world. Two different ways of understanding reality occupy the centre of the same painting without one being allowed to silence the other.

This is technical mastery, certainly, but technique alone cannot explain why the fresco continues to matter. Countless artists have possessed formidable skill. A perfectly rendered hand does not automatically produce a masterpiece, nor does mastery of perspective guarantee that anyone will care about the resulting image five centuries later.

Something beyond competence is required. A work needs vision as well as execution, the ability to take whatever technical language is available to the artist and make that language necessary to what the work is trying to say. In Raphael’s fresco, perspective is not merely a demonstration of Renaissance knowledge. It creates an intellectual universe. Architecture, philosophy and human bodies are organised into a vision of knowledge itself. Thought has been given physical space.

That helps explain why beauty alone cannot define a masterpiece. Some masterpieces are beautiful; others are violent, disturbing or deliberately difficult. Picasso’s Guernica does not need to soothe us in order to deserve serious consideration. Goya does not require elegance to make violence unforgettable. A masterpiece may create harmony or rupture it completely.

Recognisability is equally unreliable. An image can become iconic because it is endlessly reproduced, appearing on posters, clothing and advertisements until people who have never encountered the original know its silhouette. Cultural familiarity is a form of power, but recognition alone does not settle the question of mastery.

Neither does money.

In May 2017, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled from 1982 sold at Sotheby’s in New York for $110.5 million. The sale established an extraordinary auction benchmark and demonstrated the scale of demand for Basquiat’s work, but his artistic importance did not suddenly begin when the bidding passed $100 million. He was already an internationally recognised artist during his lifetime, exhibiting widely and participating in documenta 7 in Kassel in 1982.

The market can tell us what someone was willing to pay. It cannot decide what deserves to survive.

Raphael’s fresco offers a useful counterpoint because almost everything about its present status now feels inevitable. It occupies the Vatican. It belongs to the High Renaissance canon. Generations of scholars have studied it. Reproductions have carried Plato and Aristotle far beyond the room Raphael painted.

But the fresco itself is also an act of selection.

Raphael gathers figures associated with the intellectual world of classical antiquity and gives them an imagined architecture in which to coexist. Some occupy the centre. Others appear along the edges. Certain traditions and figures become part of this monumental image of knowledge because Raphael and the culture that commissioned him understood them as belonging there.

Every canon performs a similar act.

Museums acquire certain artists and not others. Academies teach particular traditions. Patrons commission according to their values. Scholars decide which objects deserve decades of study. Collectors preserve some works while others disappear. Race, gender, geography, class and access have all influenced whose work was exhibited, protected, discussed and eventually described as important.

A work cannot endure if nobody bothers to preserve it, which makes the reassuring belief that greatness inevitably finds its audience difficult to sustain.

Consider the American artist Alma Thomas (1891–1978). She spent decades teaching art in Washington, D.C., before devoting herself fully to painting after retirement. Her luminous abstractions built colour through repeated marks and patterns inspired by nature, music and space exploration. In 1972, at the age of eighty, she became the first African American woman to receive a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Her late institutional recognition does not mean the paintings suddenly acquired qualities they had previously lacked. It tells us something about recognition itself and about the structures through which artistic importance becomes visible.

Look again at Raphael’s imagined assembly. The centre of a composition appears natural only after someone has decided where to place it.

Art history has centres too.
Those centres move.

Artists once regarded as peripheral can be reconsidered. Reputations can decline. Attributions change. Works emerge from storage. Scholarship asks different questions. Museums revisit collections assembled according to assumptions that later generations no longer share.

This is why collectors matter, but it is also why collectors should approach the word masterpiece with humility. To collect is not merely to acquire property. At its most serious, collecting participates in preservation. Someone decides that an object deserves care before history has finished deciding what the object means.

The collector therefore occupies a peculiar position between conviction and uncertainty.

A collector can recognise technical ability, emotional force, intellectual seriousness and an individual visual language. A curator can construct an argument around an overlooked artist. A dealer can champion a body of work for decades. A writer can insist that something deserves another look. All of them can help move attention towards an artist who has remained at the margins.

None can command posterity to agree.

That uncertainty becomes particularly important when considering living artists or works whose historical position remains unsettled.

Frank Chinea Inguanzo’s Somewhere in Time (2017), for example, presents a strange and unstable world. Distorted figures occupy a barren landscape beneath a turbulent green sky, their bodies suspended somewhere between vulnerability, dread and transformation. The work carries traces of the artist’s experience and imagination into an image that deserves sustained looking.

Frank Chinea Inguanzo, Somewhere in Time, 2017.
Image courtesy of the artist.

Drawing on memories surrounding his emigration from Cuba in 1962, the atmosphere of the Cold War and a vivid imaginative world, Chinea Inguanzo constructs what he has described as a surreal “paradise of life and death.” Pale, distorted figures, part angelic and part demonic, inhabit barren ground while faceless forms emerge beyond a twisted forest. There is something of William Blake in the collision of the visionary and the unsettling, but the world remains distinctly Chinea Inguanzo’s: personal experience transformed rather than simply illustrated. The painting reminds us that compelling work can emerge far from the centres where cultural importance is usually declared, and that an artist’s imagination may begin constructing its own world long before history decides how that world should be valued.

To recognise those qualities is different from declaring the work a masterpiece. A gallerist, collector or writer can argue for a work. We can preserve it, exhibit it and place it before people who might otherwise never encounter it. We can recognise qualities we believe will endure. What we cannot do is stand in the present and issue instructions to the future.

That restraint does not diminish collecting. It makes collecting more interesting.

Every serious collection contains an element of risk because it represents decisions made before history has finished its work. Discovery requires conviction. Someone has to look before consensus arrives, just as someone has to preserve an object before later generations have the opportunity to judge it.

The distinction is between conviction and certainty. A collector can say, I believe this matters, without claiming to know what people living two centuries from now will think.

Raphael did not possess that knowledge either.

When he painted The School of Athens, he could not know that visitors five centuries later would still enter the Vatican rooms and find Plato and Aristotle approaching them from the centre of the wall. The fresco’s present status can make its endurance seem inevitable, but cultural survival never is. Buildings are destroyed. Works are damaged. Political orders collapse. Religious attitudes change. Taste moves elsewhere.

Survival is partly material and partly intellectual. The object has to remain, but people must also continue finding reasons to return to it.

This makes endurance more complicated than age. Thousands of old paintings survive without attracting sustained attention beyond specialist scholarship. Longevity matters to the idea of a masterpiece not because an object has simply existed for a long time, but because successive generations have continued to encounter something within it that remains capable of thought, argument, pleasure, discomfort or discovery.

Raphael’s fresco has survived that encounter repeatedly.

Return to the figures gathering around Plato and Aristotle. They do not form a silent procession towards a single answer. They argue, read, calculate, teach and listen. Some are absorbed in their own investigations while others exchange ideas. Raphael’s composition creates hierarchy without eliminating difference, giving the eye a centre without making everything outside it irrelevant.

That is also what the word masterpiece asks us to do. We create hierarchies. We distinguish exceptional objects from good ones, influential works from derivative ones, achievements we believe should remain central from those we allow to move towards the margins.

The difficulty is knowing what criteria deserve that power.

Technical mastery must matter, but it cannot be sufficient. Vision matters, though originality without substance can become novelty. Consequence matters because some works alter artistic language or transform the conversations that follow them, but influence alone does not guarantee greatness. Endurance matters too, though endurance cannot be claimed at the moment of creation.

A masterpiece may exist somewhere in the convergence of those qualities: making, vision, consequence and endurance. The balance will differ from work to work. Raphael’s achievement is not Basquiat’s, just as Alma Thomas need not satisfy the conditions of a sixteenth-century guild in order for her work to command serious attention.

This is why personal response, important as it is, cannot settle the question either.

A work may stop us cold. It may haunt us after we leave the room or provoke an emotion we struggle to explain. Such encounters are among the reasons people love art, but emotional force alone cannot make our judgement universal. A painting that transforms one viewer may leave another untouched.

Nor should the masterpiece be required to communicate instantly. Some works reveal themselves slowly. Knowledge can deepen an encounter rather than spoil it. Understanding a commission, material, political context or artistic tradition may expose layers that the eye alone could not initially recognise.

Raphael rewards exactly this kind of return. The fresco can impress before we identify a single philosopher, but knowledge changes what we see. Gestures become arguments. Groups become schools of thought. Architecture becomes more than decoration. The image expands without surrendering its visual force.

A remarkable work survives explanation. We can identify its figures, analyse its perspective, study its commission, trace its influences and reconstruct aspects of the culture that produced it, yet after all that knowledge has been assembled, the object is not exhausted. There is still something to look at.

Our contemporary desire to identify masterpieces immediately therefore contains a contradiction. We want the authority of hindsight without having to wait for history.

Markets encourage that desire. So do art fairs, museums, media and the velocity of digital culture. New works can arrive already surrounded by declarations of importance. Careers accelerate. Images cross continents before paintings have left studios. A work made this year can be described as timeless before it has survived a decade.

Some of those works may indeed become central to the history of our period. Others will not, and the difficulty is that we are standing too close to know which is which.

For collectors, that uncertainty should not produce paralysis. Collecting would become terribly dull if everyone waited for unanimous historical approval. Discovery requires knowledge, curiosity and courage, particularly when the work that commands attention sits outside whatever currently occupies the centre.

Raphael’s fresco reminds us, however, that centres are constructed. The philosophers appear inevitable in their monumental hall because the composition is so convincing. Art history can create the same illusion around its own choices.

The responsibility of each generation is therefore not simply to inherit the list of masterpieces it has been given, nor to discard that list merely because it is old. It is to look again. Some works survive renewed scrutiny. Others diminish. Objects previously excluded enter the conversation.

The masterpiece does not need to remain untouched by changing values. Its endurance may depend upon its capacity to meet them.

More than five centuries after Raphael finished The School of Athens, Plato still points towards the heavens and Aristotle still extends his hand towards the earth. Around them, arguments continue that began long before Raphael and survived long after him.

We can measure the fresco’s scale, study its perspective, trace its influence and reconstruct something of the world that produced it. What we cannot manufacture is the fact that, five centuries later, people are still returning.

Contemporary art does not yet have that advantage. We can recognise skill, originality, courage and vision. We can collect what we believe matters and preserve what others have overlooked. But there is one judgement no critic, collector, curator, dealer or auction house can make in advance.

Time has not had its vote yet.