Parallels between Courbet’s Painters Studio and Michelangelo’s School of Athens

In class Friday, when miss Quinet pulled up the image of the Painters Studio, I immediately saw an obvious similarity between The Painters Studio and The School of Athens. Right of the bat, the Gerber always atmosphere of the two paintings is very similar, both are very dynamic while being very simple. The two portray a crowd of people focusing on their individual endeavors, on a quick glance the paintings seem to just be a crowd of people extravagantly portrayed, but once the viewer analyzed each painting, individual peoples convey different messages. Along with the large crowd, each scence share the similar focal points of and individual or a few specific people. For example, in the school of Athens, the viewer will usually tend to focus their attention on Aristotle and Plato centered bellow the grand archway. In the painter studio, attention is immediately focused on Courbet and the nude woman looking over his shoulder. Now I did not manage to find images of both paintings that would fit in this blog post, but you can search on google and find dozens of images for both masterpieces.