ITP 46: The Vision of St Augustine, by Vittore Carpaccio

Date: 04-03-2001
Owning Institution: Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, Venice
Publication:     Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”    
Subject:   Renaissance      

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 such as that described, by the artist, with all the attention to detail of a man compiling an inventory. Preferring immediacy to strict accuracy, Carpaccio depicted St Augustine as if he were one of his own contemporaries, reinventing the scholar-saint as a Renaissance humanist, placing him in a distinctively light and airy sixteenth-century Venetian interior and, in the process, creating an idealised portrait of the compleat intellectual, circa 1500.

This updated Augustine is a student of ancient texts, which are all around him, heaped on the floor; propped against the circular dais on which his desk is raised, arranged on the desk itself, stacked in rows on the shelf running along the left hand side of the room, with yet more open on the rotating reading stand on the table in the small room – sanctum within a sanctum – in the background to the left. His very clothes, black the colour of ink and white the colour of parchment (with just the merest hint of episcopal purple beneath), underline the extent to which the texture of written word has shaped the texture of his existence. As Charles Lamb once wrote of an Oxford don: “with long poring, he is grown almost into a book.”

Carpaccio’s scholar is also a connoisseur and collector, principally of bronzes and figurines, tangible relics to help flesh out the visions of classical antiquity in his imagination. Such Greek and Roman objects are presented as complements rather than antitheses to his Christian convictions. The statue of the Saviour on the altar seems almost to be acknowledging the small classical statuette with similarly upraised arm, on the shelf at left. In the Renaissance studies of the learned, it was hoped, both sacred and profane mysteries might be reconciled. Carpaccio also includes several missals and sheets of music, to indicate Augustine’s expertise in mathematics and the related art of music, as well as an armillary sphere, or astronomical model of the Ptolemaic universe, to show the saint’s understanding of the cosmos. All of these intellectual attainments have, together, led him into wisdom. Sunshine streams through the windows into his room. An illuminatus, he lives in the light of God.

The artist painted his picture in oils, a technique which Venetians of his generation had learned from Flemish masters of the fifteenth century and which enabled him to depict the play of light and shade with great subtlety - to register for example both the fine wavering line of the shadow cast by the statue of Christ on the altar, and the almost pointillist effect of glitter in the mosaic of the Byzantine semi-dome above. But despite the supremely convincing naturalism of this painting, there is also something uncanny about it. Looking into the little room at the back the viewer may notice, on the stone window embrasure, a pool of sunshine striped by the shadows of glass-leading. This shows that light is coming from the left. Yet it is also coming from the right, striking the saint’s face and casting long shadows across the floor of his study. A single space, lit by two suns: how can this be?

The little dog – which Phil Buckley of the Kennel Club tentatively describes to me as “possibly an early form of spaniel, an intelligent breed historically associated with nobility and the elite of society” – also appears to think that something rather unusual is going on. Looking intently towards the light from the big windows, the animal is canine alertness personified. Something new and fascinating has just come to its attention. Saint Augustine, too, looks towards the window with an expression of dawning surprise. Pen still in hand, he has suddenly been distracted from his work. But by what? The answer to this question is also the solution to the other conundrums posed by the picture.

In 1959 the scholar Helen I. Roberts came across an interesting book about St Jerome, the Hieronymus: vita et transitus, published in Venice just seventeen years before Carpaccio finished his painting. This volume turned out to contain a previously unfamiliar account of the very end of Jerome’s life. Saint Augustine, it was said, was in his study writing a letter to Jerome at the very moment of the latter’s death. Suddenly a great light shone into the room and Jerome’s voice was heard, announcing his death and ascent to Christ.

The Hieronymus: vita et transitus was plainly Carpaccio’s text. As it was written, so has he painted it: the awestruck scholar looking up from his letter as the miraculous, supernatural light floods into his chamber. The expression of ineffable beatitude on the face of Augustine suggests his realisation that he too, one day, will be received into the ranks of the blessed. I hope the dog gets to go to heaven as well.