The image of Plato which dominates the Renaissance is that of Moses Atticus, the Attic Moses, or Greek sage whose wisdom echoed the teachings of the Bible. A striking visual representation of this is the portrait of Plato in Raphael's mural, now known as the School of Athens, located in the heart of Western Christendom, the Vatican itself. (An engraving based on this picture serves as the frontispiece for this volume.) The spirit of Raphael's portrait of Plato is very much the spirit of Plato invoked almost a century and a half later by Milton in ‘Il Penseroso' where Plato is the seer of the soul, holding the secrets of‘the immortal mind that hath forsook / Her mansion in this fleshly nook’ (II. 88–9). Raphael's unwitting anticipation of Milton is a reminder that no account of Plato in Renaissance England can ignore the key importance of the Italian Renaissance in the recovery of the Platonic corpus and the transmission of Platonic thought. Raphael's grouping of Plato with other philosophers is a reminder that throughout the Renaissance and seventeenth century Plato was always seen in relation to other thinkers. Although considered primusinter pares by his admirers, he was linked with a constellation of what they believed to be like minds, Orpheus, Hermes Trismegistus and Plotinus among them. Nor did Platonism ever dominate the philosophical scene or succeed in dislodging Aristotelianism as the core of the university curriculum. None the less, in the Renaissance the philosophy of Plato was read and valued more than at anytime since the closure of the Athenian Academy by the emperor Justinian in ad 529.