Art and the Augustinian Order in Early Renaissance Italy

The rise of the mendicant orders in the later Middle Ages coincided with rapid and dramatic shifts in the visual arts. The mendicants were prolific patrons, relying on artworks to instruct and impress their diverse lay congregations. Churches and chapels were built, and new images and iconographies developed to propagate mendicant cults. But how should the two phenomena be related? How much were these orders actively responsible for artistic change, and how much did they simply benefit from it? To explore these questions, Art and the Augustinian Order in Early Renaissance Italy looks at art in the formative period of the Augustinian Hermits, an order with a particularly difficult relation to art. As a first detailed study of visual culture in the Augustinian order, this book will be a basic resource, making available previously inaccessible material, discussing both well-known and more neglected artworks, and engaging with fundamental methodological questions for pre-modern art and church history, from the creation of religious iconographies to the role of gender in art.

Louise Bourdua is Senior Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Aberdeen, UK. Anne Dunlop is Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art at Yale University, USA.

Contents: Introduction: the Augustinians, the mendicant orders, and early-Renaissance art, Anne Dunlop; Hermits, habits, and history - the dress of the Augustinian hermits, Cordelia Warr; Entombing the founder St Augustine of Hippo, Louise Bourdua; Simone Martini's panel of the Blessed Agostino Novello: the creation of a local saint, Cathleen Hoeniger; Black humour: the Cappellone at Tolentino, Anne Dunlop; Augustine and the new Augustinianism in the choir frescoes of the Eremitani, Padua, Janis Elliott; Time, history and the cosmos: the Dado in the apse of the church of the Eremitani, Padua, Catherine Harding; St Anthony Abbot in Sant'Agostino, Montalcino: an Augustinian image in the Sienese contado, Diana Norman; Santa Monica, Venice, and the Vivarini, Ian Holgate; St Augustine's ecstasy before the Trinity in the art of the hermits, c. 1360-c.1440, Donal Cooper; Raphael, ceremonial banners and devotional prints: new light on Città di Castello's Nicholas of Tolentino altarpiece, Robert Cobianchi; Index.