Sacred and legendary art, volume 1 (of 2): Containing legends of the angels and archangels, the evangelists, the Apostles, the doctors of the church, and St. Mary magdalene, as represented in the fine arts.Jameson, Mrs. (Anna)
Religion
Sacred and legendary art, volume 1 (of 2): Containing legends of the angels and archangels, the evangelists, the Apostles, the doctors of the church, and St. Mary magdalene, as represented in the fine arts.
Jameson, Mrs. (Anna)
Christian art and symbolism; Christian saints in art
1. Monica brings her son to school; the master receives him; the
scholars are sitting in a row conning their hornbooks. The names of
Monica and Augustine are inscribed in the glories round their heads.
This is a very curious little oval picture of the early part of the
fourteenth century.[279]
Benozzo Gozzoli has painted the same subject in a large fresco in
the church of San Geminiano at Volterra (A.D. 1460). Monica presents
her son to the schoolmaster, who caresses him; in the background a
little boy is being whipped, precisely in the same attitude in which
correction is administered to this day in some of our schools.
2. St. Augustine under the fig-tree meditating, with the inscription,
‘Dolores animæ salutem parturientes;’ and the same subject varied,
with the inscription, _Tolle, lege_. He tells us in his Confessions,
that while still unconverted and in deep communion with his friend
Alypius on the subject of the Scriptures, the contest within his mind
was such that he rushed from the presence of his friend and threw
himself down beneath a fig-tree, pouring forth torrents of repentant
tears; and he heard a voice, as it were the voice of a child, repeating
several times, ‘_Tolle, lege_,’ ‘Take and read;’ and returning to the
place where he had left his friend, and taking up the sacred volume,
he opened it at the verse of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, ‘Not
in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in
strife and envying; but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not
provision for the flesh.’ Considering that this was the voice of God,
he took up the religious profession, to the great joy of his mother and
his friend.
3. C. Procaccino. The Baptism of St. Augustine in the presence of St.
Monica. This is a common subject in chapels dedicated to St. Augustine
or St. Monica.[280]
4. As the supposed founder of one of the four great religious
communities, St. Augustine is sometimes represented as giving the rules
to his Order: or in the act of writing them, while his monks stand
around, as in a picture by Carletto Cagliari:[281] both are common
subjects in the houses of the Augustine friars. The habit is black.[282]
5. St. Augustine dispensing alms, generally in a black habit, and with
a bishop’s mitre on his head.
6. St. Augustine, washing the feet of the pilgrims, sees Christ descend
from above to have his feet washed with the rest; a large picture in
the Bologna Academy by Desubleo, a painter whose works, with this one
exception, are unknown to me. The saint wears the black habit of an
Augustine friar, and is attended by a monk with a napkin in his hand.
I found the same subject in the Louvre, in a Spanish picture of the
seventeenth century; above is seen a church (like the Pantheon) in
a glory, and Christ is supposed to utter the words, ‘_Tibi commendo
Ecclesiam meam_.’[283]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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