On the Sunday before Crufts, this week’s painting is Vittore Carpaccio’s depiction of St Augustine accompanied by his alert and evidently very good dog. Carpaccio was commissioned to create The Vision of St Augustine by a community of Slavs from Dalmatia (now part of Croatia) living in the cosmopolitan and multi-racial Renaissance city of Venice. The artist created two cycles of paintings for the main debating chamber of the Slavs’ Venetian scuola – their principal meeting house – both of which are still to be found in situ. The first, illustrating scenes from the life of St George, was intended to furnish edifying examples of the vita activa, or active life. The second, showing the miracles of St Jerome (an appropriate choice, since he had been born in Dalmatia) epitomised the contrasting virtues of the vita contemplativa, or contemplative life.

The work reproduced here is the last and climactic scene of the latter sequence, although just why a series devoted to the life of St Jerome should have culminated, instead, in a painting of St Augustine, was a long-unsolved mystery. All became clear as the result of a scholarly discovery made in the late 1950s. This proved that the picture was not simply, as it seemed to be, the image of a saint in his study, but the depiction of a miracle. The dog, apparently paying such rapt attention to its master, turned out to have been looking at something else, and something much stranger, for all those years.

Carpaccio took certain liberties with his subject. St Augustine, fifth-century Bishop of Hippo and author of The City of God, is unlikely to have borne much resemblance to the figure depicted here. The real Augustine was black, for one thing, and would never have occupied a room...

To read the full article please either login or register .