Art historians Louise Bourdua and Anne Dunlop have collected ten papers on a subject in Italian early mendicant art that has been underdeveloped by Italian and Anglophone scholars. While the interrelationships of the Dominican and Franciscan orders with religious art have a long history, apart from papers delivered at two seminal conferences in the early 1990s, Augustinian-inspired and patronized art has received short shrift. All of the mendicant orders used and encouraged the use of art for teaching, and the influence of this impetus on late medieval and early Renaissance style and content, especially in Italy, remains a matter of active debate. This collection of original essays thus addresses both the lacuna in Augustinian studies and that in the mendicants-and-art debate.

The historical certainty surrounding the founders and the relatively late foundations of the Dominicans and Franciscans stands in contrast to the shakier identity of the Augustinians, whose namesake had died nearly a millennium before the fourteenth century. Indeed, “Augustinian” referred to two distinct organizations—Hermits and Canons—that coalesced in the Great Union of 1256, which created a single order with two branches. Since Bishop Augustine historically had lived with his canons in Hippo Regius, but never as an anchorite, the Hermits had an especially weak hold on their eponymous “founder.” Several of the essays explore the uses of art by the Hermits to emphasize their rootedness in Augustine and the superiority of the hermitic tradition in general. Cordelia Warr explores the role of the order's habit as an expression of identity. In the wake of the Union, Hermits and Canons fought over retaining one or the other's traditional garb and sought to distinguish themselves visually from the expanding Dominicans. The decision had artistic ramifications, as Augustinian saints, no less than the good bishop himself, would have to be clad distinctively as well. In her study of the placement and iconography of the monumental sculpted arca, or freestanding tomb and funerary monument, that marks Augustine's tomb in Pavia's church of San Pietro in Cielo, Bourdua further develops the dynamics of the intra-order rivalry and the use of iconography—Augustine as hermit—to establish identity.

Cathleen Hoeniger's examination of Simone Martini's panel portrait of the prior general Blessed Agostino Novello (d. 1310), today in Siena's Pinacotheca, emphasizes its role in the order's attempt to establish a civic cult of Agostino in the city near which he died and in which he remains buried. No less than other Catholic orders, the Augustinians wanted to add their heroes to the festal calendars of fourteenth-century Italy and to the canon of universal saints. She outlines the process and interprets the panel as an introduction of the man and his purported miracles to the Sienese, who were encouraged to adopt him and venerate him as a patron who combined the active life of a friar with the contemplative spirituality of the hermit. Dunlop discusses the portrayal of another exemplary Augustinian, Nicholas of Tolentino, who was the first canonized Augustinian (1446). She focuses on the cycle of Nicholas's life at Tolentino's Cappellone, probably from the 1320s. It is accompanied by similar cycles of the lives of Christ and Mary and was probably meant to be seen as running in parallel, as an imitatio Christi. Like Agostino's portrait, this narrative series was part of an effort to canonize an Augustinian, an effort that only bore fruit after Nicholas gained notoriety as a plague saint. Roberto Cobianco discusses Raphael's earliest documented work, the Nicholas of Tolentino altarpiece in Città di Castello, and its origins in a processional banner celebrating the saint's canonization in 1446. Diana Norman contributes a short study of the iconography and patronage of the panel of St. Anthony Abbot (by Bartolo di Fredi?) in the church of San Agostino, Montalcino. Though she believes the patron to be a laywoman, Norman ascribes the image and dossal narrative scenes to support for eremetic Augustinian identity.

Janis Elliot approaches the now lost but photographically preserved choir frescoes in the Augustinians' Eremitani, or hermitage church, in Padua. In her analysis and interpretation, she also picks up the theme of hermetic Augustinian self-identity and self-promotion in the face of competing mendicants' efforts. She links the pictorial program's main features, the Passion of Christ and Last Judgment, to Augustine's discussion of these subjects in his City of God and Literal Meaning of Genesis, Book 12. Since the Judgment scene typically is situated near the door opposite the altar, and since Augustine does discuss both the Passion and Judgment in tandem in Genesis, Elliot sees the Eremitani's arrangement as a bold theological statement on Augustine's behalf, an example of the fourteenth century's “new Augustinianism.” While she mentions the relation of the judgment to funerary chapels in the church's apse, she fails to develop the Eucharistic relevance of both pictorial themes. Catherine Harding keeps us in the Eremitani, discussing the astrological imagery of the seven planets ruling the seven ages of humans. In this early product of her research, she concludes that the pictorial juxtapositions were meant as a “visual exercise” of the type Augustine prescribed for disciplining the will and vision for the visio Dei.

Ian Holgate studies the cult of St. Monica, Augustine's mother, whose remains were discovered in Ostia in 1430. Immediately the Chapter General required every Augustinian church to display an image of her. Holgate works with Antonio Vivarini's portrait in Sto. Stefano in Venice. He relates it to both the Augustinians' female Third Order and to female devotees, lay and religious, more generally. A small panel showing her vesting her son with the order's robe and distinctive belt serves to link both her and the order to the great bishop and saint. Finally, Donal Cooper takes another apocryphal event, Augustine's ecstatic vision of the Trinity, and examines it in light of the Franciscans' use of Francis's visions and stigmata. He connects the story to passages in Confessions (IX: “charity wounds the heart”) and De Trinitate, and notes that it is the source of the Order's pierced heart emblem.