Plato

Plato opened the upper row on the north wall of Federico da Montefeltro's study, paired with his own pupil, Aristotle. In every pair of famous men the older figure was placed on the left, so the portraits also read as a timeline. The ancient Greeks in the series are dressed in loose clothes with an Eastern flavour, and Plato here has long curling hair, a heavy beard and a green mantle, one finger laid on the page of an open book. The Louvre gives the panel to two painters working together, the Fleming Justus of Ghent and the Spaniard Pedro Berruguete.

A generation later, an artist close to the young Raphael filled a small sketchbook with drawings, and about a dozen of them copy heads from this series, Plato among them, perhaps from earlier drawings and not from the panels themselves. Raphael was born in Urbino in 1483, the son of a painter at Federico's court, and for a long time the book was simply called Raphael's sketchbook. It is now in the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice, which since 1984 has catalogued it as the work of a contemporary who also copied Raphael's youthful drawings.