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  • Art and the Augustinian Order in Early Renaissance Italy
  • Eric L. Saak
Art and the Augustinian Order in Early Renaissance Italy. Edited by Louise Bourdua and Anne Dunlop. [Church, Faith and Culture in the Medieval West.] (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company. 2007. Pp. xvi, 231. $99.95. ISBN 978-0-754-65655-5.)

This is an important book. The Order of Hermits of St. Augustine (OESA) has been overshadowed by the Franciscan and Dominican Orders in the scholarship devoted to the religious, intellectual, and cultural history of the later Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation, with the exception of the relationship between the Augustinian friars and Martin Luther. Recent scholarship, however, has begun to address this gap, and Bourdua and Dunlop have made a significant contribution. As Dunlop notes in her introductory chapter, the OESA "has received little attention from art historians, and yet it has a unique import for any rethinking of art and religious institutions in the pre-modern period" (p. 2). Following in the wake of Joseph C. Schnaubelt and Frederick Van Fleteren's edited volume, Augustine in Iconography: History and Legend (New York, 1999), and Meredith Gill's Augustine in the Italian Renaissance: Art and Philosophy from Petrarch to Michelangelo (Cambridge, 2005), Bourdua and Dunlop's work proposes to focus on the OESA "to examine the 'mendicant thesis'" (p. 2), which argues that the mendicant orders effected "the first artistic shifts of the Renaissance" (p. 2). Simply by posing the question, the editors have given new prominence to the OESA, which the historical evidence so amply documents only to have been ignored in the historiography.

In addition to Dunlop's introductory chapter, the work consists of ten case studies, from the origins of the order's habit and Augustine's tomb in Pavia (1362) to the fifteenth-century portrayals of Augustine's vision of the Trinity and the artistic representations of the Augustinian St. Nicholas of Tolentino. The contributions are detailed and erudite, yet the reader is proverbially always left wanting more. There is no concluding chapter summing up the findings, and the reader does not possess a clear sense of the volume's contribution to the "mendicant thesis" as such, its stated goal, even if the individual chapters give ample evidence of the OESA's influence, perhaps most notably in Cathleen Hoeniger's chapter on "Simone Martini's Panel of the Blessed Agostino Novello: the Creation of a Local Saint" (pp. 51–78). Donal Cooper's chapter on Augustine's vision of the Trinity dates it to the 1360s and the Venetian artist Nicoletto Semitecolo, whereas earlier depictions of the motif can be found in [End Page 818] the Erfurt stained-glass cycle dated to 1324 and in Jordan of Quedlinburg's Metrum pro depingenda vita Sancti Augustini of 1341. It is also perhaps surprising that the works of Hans Belting are never cited, when the overall thrust of the volume is to analyze the "image and its public." Even though such "Kleinigkeiten" can easily be multiplied, Bourdua and Dunlop have contributed substantially to our understanding of OESA's impact in the Renaissance and consequently to our understanding of the reception, understanding, influence, and impact of Augustine in the fourteenth to the later fifteenth centuries. If "art imitates nature," Bourdua and Dunlop have provided precious insights into the nature of the late-medieval and Renaissance Augustine and his true sons, as Europe was ceasing to be "medieval" and becoming "early modern."

Eric L. Saak
Indiana University–Purdue University, Indianapolis
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