The School of Athens. This is a detail of a huge fresco by Raphael, finished in 1511, in the Apostolic Palace in The Vatican. These blokes are Plato (left) and Aristotle.
The popular idea that the rhetorical gestures of Plato and Aristotle are kinds of pointing (to the heavens, and down to earth) is very likely. But Plato’s Timaeus – which is the book Raphael places in his hand – was a sophisticated treatment of space, time, and change, including the Earth, which guided mathematical sciences for over a millennium. Aristotle, with his four-elements theory, held that all change on Earth was owing to motions of the heavens.