St Augustine Among The Mendicants

In the early fourteenth century, the recently established Order of Augustinian Hermits began to promote the claim that St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) had founded their mendicant order in fifth-century Italy. By refashioning the historical account of their Orders founding in textual and visual sources, the Hermits transformed St. Augustine from a North African bishop to a mendicant father, alongside St. Francis of Assisi and St. Dominic. This dissertation examines how the Order promoted its evolving founding narrative and celebrated its spiritual ideals through monumental artistic narratives of Augustines life, produced in churches and monasteries in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy. As the friars invented a new iconographic tradition for the saint, they highlighted a different aspect of Augustines identity his singular role as the father and founder of the Hermits. My focus on Italian monumental cycles enables me to discern patterns of decoration in early Renaissance churches and to examine the importance of narrative art to the Orders corporate aims.My study provides a richer understanding of mendicant patronage by examining a saint whose vita differed from the biographies of traditional founder saints, and an order whose founding narratives contrasted sharply with the more contemporary origins of the better known Franciscans and Dominicans. Despite the prominence of the Hermits as distinguished artistic patrons, the scholarship on Augustinian art remains scarce in comparison to the voluminous studies devoted to Franciscan and Dominican patronage. As a result, the Hermits are often excluded from studies of Franciscan and Dominican art. As a fifth-century North African saint, Augustine differed in many fundamental ways from his fellow mendicant founders. My study investigates how the new St. Augustine fit into the established paradigm of the mendicant founder, and how the Orders representation of their founder compared to the conventional models of mendicant art patronage in general. In some cases, this comparative approach reveals the creativity of artists and patrons in transforming Augustines image to conform to the established model of mendicant founder, as European saint and mendicant exemplar. In other instances, this study illuminates how the Hermits challenged the traditional image of the mendicant founder and departed from the artistic traditions of the Franciscans and Dominicans.