Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
Introduction
Of Portraits, Voices, and the Art of Mosaic
Medieval and Renaissance artists loved to imagine the great saints of the past, how they looked, how they dressed, how they lived. St. Augustine (354–430) was an occasional subject. Most artistic renderings of him, whether in paintings or illuminated manuscripts or stained glass windows, are rather workmanlike.1 But there is one great portrait of him. It is a large oil painting by Vittore Carpaccio (c. 1460–c. 1526), entitled Saint Augustine in His Study.2 Carpaccio portrays Augustine seated behind a desk, stylus in hand, his right arm raised in the air, poised between thoughts, ready to transcribe the next great theological inspiration. Scattered about his desk and beneath his feet are books, some piled up, others lying open, all expensively bound. He sits completely alone in a spacious, elegant study. The room's high ceiling is ornately paneled. In the background is a small private chapel, located in a niche, with an episcopal miter left behind on the altar and an episcopal crosier leaning up against the wall. Augustine himself is given a European's face, bearded, fair-skinned.3 He is dressed in the refined robes of a Renaissance bishop and gazes out not at us, but to the left, at some scene visible through the nearby window or, more likely, at some far-off horizon beyond the senses' grasp.
It is a wonderfully dramatic image. It is also almost entirely wrong. What's wrong with it? First, Augustine was no European. He was an African, a native of Thagaste (now Souk Ahras in Algeria), and he spent nearly 35 years of his life as the bishop of a second-rate, bustling North African port city, Hippo Regius (now Annaba on the Algerian-Tunisian border). His contemporaries acclaimed him one of the great masters of the Latin language,
1. See Joseph C. Schnaubelt and Frederick Van Fleteren, eds., Augustine in Iconography: History and Legend, Augustinian Historical Institute Series, vol. 4 (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1999).
2. This painting graces the cover of two of the finest contemporary scholarly studies of Augustine: Allan Fitzgerald's Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), and Peter Brown's Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
3. Patricia Fortini Brown, "Carpaccio's St. Augustine in His Study: A Portrait Within a Portrait," Augustine in Iconography, 507–37, argues that Carpaccio based his Augustine figure on the appearance of Cardinal Bessarion (1403–1473), bishop of Nicaea, who spent key parts of his career in Venice.