Augustine in the Italian Renaissance: Art and Philosophy from Petrarch to Michelangelo (review)

Augustine in the Italian Renaissance is an ambitious book, and the erudite art historian Meredith J. Gill, who is well aware of how vast, complex, and difficult a topic she has addressed, deserves a great deal of credit for exploring the historical function of this important saint not only in the visual arts but in the literature and philosophy of the period. This is not an easy task, to be sure, and perhaps the second chapter of her book, which is particularly insightful and useful, most precisely defines the role and function of Augustine in the Renaissance. This chapter explores the development of the rule and order of the Augustinians during this period and then discusses how the "polemic between the two religious communities, the Canons and the Hermits," as Gill puts it in her introduction, "forged a new iconography of Augustine" (2). The information in this chapter is wide-ranging, and provides a great deal of specific background necessary to explain the appearance of images of Augustine in Pavia, Padua, Gubbio, and San Gimignano. Equally rewarding is the final chapter, "Augustine and Creation," which focuses on Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. Gill makes use of a variety of scholarly writings on Augustine's importance in the overall plan of the chapel. Here, as elsewhere in this book, her exposition is not only learned and thoroughly researched and documented but also written in a very accessible style.

This said, there are some problems with this ambitious book that arise as early as the introduction. For example, the introduction does not provide a rationale for reading the five chapters as an integrated whole with a single, motivating thesis. It does announce a "topic" (rather than a fully articulated thesis), and explains how that topic will be anatomized. However, it does not provide a description of how the Italian Renaissance constructed and reworked the 'idea' of Augustine in so many different formats, places, and guises. Furthermore, Gill's comment in the introduction—that "it is striking that Augustine was wholly missing from Dante's cosmos, where he makes only a brief, somewhat official appearance. He must, however, be present in a variety of ways in the Vita Nuova and the Convivio" (2)—is wrong. This statement, brief as it is, may seem to be too marginal to take issue with in a review of a 214-page book, but I would argue that it is not marginal at all in the context of some later lines of thought that Gill could have pursued and developed. For, as John Freccero argued long ago, and as a number of scholars have since convincingly demonstrated (among them, Giuseppe Mazzotta), Augustine—or a certain construct of Augustine—was absolutely crucial to the entire fabric of the Divine Comedy. Augustine's apparently marginal presence in the Divine Comedy masks his underlying centrality if we think of the poem in terms of confessional autobiography, rhetorical persuasion, reading practices, sign theory, journey, errancy, and conversion. No sooner, in fact, do we enter the first real gritty punishment of hell, in canto 5 of the Inferno, than one of the sinners—the memorable and voluble Francesca—cites from a critical moment of the Confessions, when Augustine, having finally picked up the Bible and felt the full grace of God suffuse his mind and heart, no longer feels the need to read any further and so closes the book, fully converted after having erred so long in his journey toward God. While it may seem a minor quibble on my part to single out and take issue with Gill's misreading of Dante's debt to Augustine, I would submit that Petrarch's deep interest in Augustine is not independent of Dante's but strongly connected to it.

Literary scholars therefore might balk at Gill's offhand treatment of Dante precisely because it limits Gill's ability to see how Petrarch, even if he scandalously claimed only...