During the fourteenth century the Augustinians were prolific patrons of art and architecture in northern and central Italy, the region on the peninsula where the order first emerged. The friars commissioned many significant works including pieces from renowned and highly skilled artists such as Simone Martini and Raphael. Yet traditionally the wealth of visual culture produced and used by the order has not received extensive attention from art historians who have largely focused on better-known works made for other mendicant orders such as the Franciscans and the Dominicans. This collection of essays, meticulously edited by Louise Bourdua and Anne Dunlop, aims to redress this imbalance through paying renewed scholarly attention to some of the major artistic projects created for the Hermits of St Augustine in the first two centuries of the history of the order.

Following the foundation of the order in 1256, when once disparate hermit communities were brought together under a single rule, the Augustinians entered an intense period of self-definition. Without a foundation saint with the standing of a St Francis or a St Dominic, the Augustinians were at a disadvantage. Thus they invented a mythical origin for themselves, claiming St Augustine of Hippo as their founder and establishing themselves as his institutional, spiritual and intellectual heirs. While this astute strategy imposed greater unity on their originally diverse constituents and provided the order with an antique and prestigious pedigree, it inevitably brought them into murky waters concerning the use and function of art. St Augustine had maintained an ambivalent position about the role and function of the visual arts, believing that images offered a dangerously false likeness of the real. His articulation of this preliminary and incomplete aesthetic theory complicated the relationship of the Augustinians to art and brought up significant questions for the order about how they understood and used images. This volume considers the relationship that the order had to the aesthetic theory of their founder through a number of specific case studies.

The book begins with an excellent introduction by Anne Dunlop and is followed by ten essays arranged chronologically and spanning the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. In the first paper Cordelia Warr investigates the controversies surrounding the codification of the habit of the friars. The importance paid to dress in scenes such as the Baptism and Vestition of St Augustine in painted and sculptural works made for the order indicate the many issues that the choice of costume signified. The theme of controversy is discussed next in Louise Bourdua's well-argued paper concerning the early debate between the hermits and the canons over the visual programme of the tomb of their shared founder, St Augustine, at S. Pietro in Ciel d'Oro. In her paper on Simone Martini's panel painting of the Beato Agostino Novello, Cathleen Hoeniger considers the intentions of the Augustinian patrons of the work to firmly establish this little-known saint within Sienese civic and religious consciousness. St Nicholas of Tolentino is the focus of Anne Dunlop's paper in which she turns her attention to the decoration of the Cappellone of the saint, convincingly relating the paintings to Augustinian aesthetic theory. Both Janis Elliott and Catherine Harding focus on the iconographic programme of the frescoes painted by Guariento d'Arpo for the Church of the Eremitani considering how learning and erudition rooted in the teaching of the order informed the decoration of the choir. Subsequently, female patronage and the involvement of women with the cult of Augustinian saints are themes taken up by Diana Norman and Ian Holgate. Norman provides convincing evidence for the involvement of the Tuscan laywoman Petra Cacciati in sponsoring the decoration of the chapel of St Anthony Abbot in Sant'Agostino in Montalcino. Holgate also emphasises the important roles women played in the promotion of Augustinian saints in his persuasive discussion of how visual culture was used to establish the cult of the mother of St Augustine, St Monica, in Florence and Venice. Donal Cooper tackles the question of the order's self-definition through a fascinating reading of the iconography of the ecstasy of St Augustine before the Trinity and the piercing of Augustine's heart. He argues that these images provided the friars with opportunities to resolve long-standing tensions surrounding the presentation of their founder and to link him to the well-known mystical experience of St Francis thus firmly situating him within the visionary experience of late medieval spirituality. The last essay, by Roberto Cobianchi, pushes the chronological focus of the volume into the sixteenth century. Cobianchi argues that by the beginning of the Renaissance period a recognisably ‘Augustinian’ style of painting could be identified and that Raphael's Città di Castello altarpiece fits within this push for increased visual coherence within the artwork made for the order.

The series of essays in this volume raise thought-provoking and important questions about how the Augustinians negotiated their intellectual and spiritual commitment to the ideas of St Augustine, including his image theory, with their choice of style, iconography and subject matter for the works of art that they commissioned. Within the larger context of the great rise of the visual arts in this period and the contingent shift in the style and content of images, the authors of this volume provide innovative and varied interpretations of the relationship between art and institutions.