Images of the bleeding heart of Augustine are a feature of the late medieval Augustinian Order of Hermits that characterise the order's self-conception through a peculiar representation of their putative founder and religious exemplar. In the three images examined in this article, Augustine's own monastic order depicts him in ecstatic rapture at an encounter with the divine, experiencing physical injury and issue of blood at the sight of the Trinity, rather than as the image of him initiated by Possidius of a bishop, saint and Church Father.
These images of Augustine, commissioned by the Ordo Eremitarum Sancti Augustini (OESA), are examined in order to establish aspects of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century understanding of Augustine amongst the Augustinian Hermits that extends beyond his theological influence, and that differs from the image of Augustine as an alter-Franciscus, typically put forward by art historians. In the three images considered, from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Augustine opens a slit in his habit to reveal a bleeding heart, which is struck by rays emanating from the Trinity. While more ubiquitous images of Augustine present him in episcopal garb, attesting to his place within Christian theology and ecclesiology, these images reveal a disparate idea of the Church Father, depicted in the habit of the Augustinian Order and undergoing a genre of bodily mystical experience frequently depicted in medieval art. Given their claims to genuine Augustinian parentage, the Hermits required a founder who typified the archetypal religious experience in a way relevant to their own religious context; the significance of this imagery of Augustine thus lies in the way in which it defines what the Hermits conceived as their own essential Augustinianism.
In order to demonstrate the significance of these images, I will begin by discussing existing scholarship and complications in methodology: the problems of terminology surrounding Augustinianism, and the subordination of the Augustinian Order to the larger mendicant orders with regard to this iconography. I will then discuss the context within which these artworks were created, and examine their content and composition, before moving on to consider the possible significance of such visual language and themes both alone and in conjunction with the better-known pieces by Giotto of the stigmatisation of Francis. I will then investigate the religious climate surrounding the production of these images of Augustine, and draw conclusions about its significance.
This paper will conclude that the images of Augustine in ecstasy before the Trinity are representative of an understanding of the Church Father that is distinctive to the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century eremitical Augustinian Order. Existing within a religious climate that saw the opportunity of salvation through the body, and which emphasised the physical suffering of Christ, this imagery reflects the desire for physical imitatio Christi within eremitical Augustinian spirituality. The Hermits existed within a unique nexus of religious influences; as part of the larger mendicancy movement, but also inheritors of the eremitical life from their monastic forebears, as well as champions of Augustine's lifestyle, they represented a confluence of a plethora of devotional emphases. Thus, their religious productions, whether textual or visual, are illustrations of their unique religious circumstances, and can reveal elements of their devotional and theological ideas. Not only were the Hermits functioning within a typically late medieval religious setting that emphasised physical suffering as holding salvific power, but they were also struggling to represent themselves as the genuine religious descendants of Augustine. As such, their representations of Augustine present the saint in a way that characterises his relevance to their late medieval mendicant lifestyle and their view of the fundamentals of the Augustinian religious lifestyle.
Methodology in the reception of Augustine
The study of the reception of Augustine has long been a focus of interest to theologians and historians alike. Studies of the use of this Church Father by the Reformers have been particularly prevalent, given the soteriological similarities of Luther and Calvin to the anti-Pelagianism of Augustine. This approach has led to investigations into late medieval uses of Augustine as a possible antecedent to the justification theology of the European Reformation.
Interest in late medieval Augustinianism is best encapsulated in the work of Heiko Oberman,Footnote 1 Damasus TrappFootnote 2 and Adolar Zumkeller.Footnote 3 Their focus on the reception of Augustine in the fourteenth century has led to their theses of an Augustinian Renaissance, a schola Augustiniana moderna and Augustinerschule, respectively. These concepts have all posited an increase in learning in terms of the Augustinian corpus, greater precision in citations and an exaggerated anti-Pelagianism, but differ with regard to how far these trends were exclusive to the Augustinian Order, and how far they were restricted to the use of Augustine, as opposed to other theological sources. All three writers have alluded to links between a fourteenth-century Augustinian school and the emergence of Reformation soteriology. Such investigations into the intellectual origins of the European Reformation use Luther's profession as an Augustinian monk as a key element in his use of Augustine, painting the order as a core element in his intellectual formation as a Reformer.
These theses suffer from the notion that there was theological consistency amongst the Hermits – which is implausible given their tendency to educate their masters outside the order – and from the idea that the Hermits were, in some way, more Augustinian than other late medieval theologians.Footnote 4 This approach overlooks aspects of the Hermits' theology that could be interpreted as not Augustinian, and therefore de-emphasises Aristotelianism, Occamism and nominalism.Footnote 5
Within this context, the study of the reception of Augustine, particularly in the late medieval period, has suffered from some serious methodological problems. Difficulties in defining ‘Augustinianism’ have surfaced, and the need to explain the formation of Luther has projected Reformation concerns back onto the preceding generations. As argued by Alister McGrath, the concept of Augustinianism may be one that no longer carries with it any real theological meaning, and therefore statements labelling schools or theologians as Augustinian ought to be abandoned.Footnote 6 Difficulties in definition have rendered it an unhelpful term that does more to confuse than to clarify. As David Steinmetz astutely stated, ‘it all depends what you mean by “Augustinian”’,Footnote 7 as the task of systematising Augustine's ideas into an essential ‘Augustinianism’ has proved elusive.
When studying Augustinianism in the Middle Ages, there are the additional difficulties of imprecision in terminology. As Jaroslav Pelikan has noted, the history of Western Christian thought in the Middle Ages ought to be approached as a ‘series of footnotes to Augustine’.Footnote 8 This method was echoed by William Courtenay, who emphasised that it is inappropriate to speak of Augustinianism when referring to the influence of Augustine in the Middle Ages, for there is little to be found that is not affected by him.Footnote 9
The Augustinian Order is certainly essential to an understanding of the legacy of Augustine in the Middle Ages, particularly given its claim of monastic and religious descent from monasteries established by Augustine himself. It is unfounded, however, to assume, as Zumkeller has done,Footnote 10 that Augustinianism is the unique preserve of the Hermits. This tendency appears also in the work of Eric Saak on the late medieval creation of the Augustinian myth, which advocates a historical Augustinianism divorced from theological Augustinianism, which can be investigated exclusively in the setting of the Hermits.Footnote 11 While Saak has pointed to a fruitful area of research, namely the Augustinian myth within the Augustinian Order of Hermits, both he and Zumkeller have been too narrow in their definition of Augustinianism, restricting it to the order to the exclusion of all other medieval theologians.
Certainly, one need not necessarily have a precise definition of Augustinianism in order to speak of the influence of Augustine in the Middle Ages, but statements of Augustinianism ought not be used without a clearer understanding of what is meant by that term and why. That theologians claimed to be following Augustine is more interesting than how accurate or effective that use was, and reveals much more about the priorities of those theologians. Rather than struggling with definition, we might begin to use depictions of Augustine, whether in textual or visual imagery, as an interpretive tool for understanding late medieval religious emphases and practices. Historically, Augustine has functioned as the archetypal Christian in various settings, whether as the prototypical theologian, bishop, monk, convert, Catholic, proto-Protestant, vanquisher of heresy, proponent of grace or even mystic. This methodology is particularly useful for examining the image of Augustine held by the Hermits in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as the creation of their order is inextricably linked with the late medieval reception of Augustine.
As an order founded by a papal fiat in 1256,Footnote 12 the OESA, unlike the two larger mendicant orders, the Franciscans and the Dominicans, lacked a charismatic contemporaneous figure as their founder and so needed to demonstrate Augustine's relevance to their lifestyle. The Hermits maintained that, prior to the great union of 1256, they existed as disparate eremitical groups which had all been following the Rule of Augustine and been founded directly by the bishop-saint himself.Footnote 13 Their conscious self-identification with the legacy of Augustine can be observed in their documented altercations with the Augustinian Canons Regular, who likewise claimed the Church Father as their founder.Footnote 14 As an order that portrayed itself as the only true sons of Augustine, the Hermits self-consciously connected themselves to the example of the Church Father, and so their depictions of Augustine must in some way reveal what they believed to be the apotheosis of religious experience. Why was it so important that they be identified with Augustine in particular? What aspects of Augustine's life held religious and theological meaning for them? These are questions that, with very few exceptions, have yet to be addressed in scholarship.
The Hermits' representations of Augustine reveal what they believed Augustine must have been, not an understanding of the historical Augustine as we have come to know him. Their Augustine was one who functioned as the founder of a late medieval monastic order and, as such, it was important that their depictions of him represented a figure that responded to the needs of their present, and supported their distinctly eremitical piety and lifestyle.
Methodology in Augustinian iconography
Scholarship on the images of the ecstasy of Augustine, with a wounded and bleeding heart, in the face of a vision of the Trinity, painted by Nicoletto Semitecolo, Ottaviano Nelli and an anonymous Sienese painter (see figs 1–3), has, to date, identified them as imitations of the more numerous images of the stigmatisation of Francis. In particular, the work of Donal Cooper, Sharon Dale and Meredith Gill has noted their similarity in composition, subject matter and theme.Footnote 15 While it is true that the images of Francis surfaced earlier than those of Augustine, it does not follow that chronological precedence or quantity imply that the images of Augustine exist merely as imitation. Scholarship that dismisses this imagery because of its similarity to Franciscan iconography fails to recognise the cross-monastic religious attitudes at work and the theological implications of such attitudes. Moreover, given that these images were commissioned by the Augustinian Order and depict images of their religious founder, they should be examined within the setting of the order's own spirituality; the influence of the other mendicant orders such as the Franciscans was but one of the forces acting upon the Hermits, and ought not to be privileged unduly. While Donal Cooper has certainly attempted to address this imbalance, he maintains that the Gubbio fresco (see fig. 3) ‘suggests a slavish adherence to dominant Franciscan models'.Footnote 16
(Colour online) Nicoletto Semitecolo, Painted panel crucifix (detail of foot of crucifix), egg tempera on panel, c. 1360s, Eremitani, Padua. © Donal Cooper.
(Colour online) Anonyous Sienese painter, St Augustine, St John the Baptist and lay donor, fresco, 1374, San Salvatore, Lecceto. © author
(Colour online) Ottaviano Nelli, The Ecstasy of St Augustine before the Trinity, fresco, c. 1420–30, Sant'Agostino, Gubbio. © author
There has certainly been a rich tradition of scholarship investigating Augustinian iconography, particularly on the association of Augustine with imagery of the heart, given his popular designation as the ‘doctor of love’. Augustine's affective language when describing his experiences of the divine, particularly in the Confessiones, resonates strongly with such imagery, and is the source for this visual trope, which finds continued expression throughout the Renaissance and further on into modernity. The Augustinian Order later appropriated the imagery of heart and arrow into its own insignia, effectively making conventional a visual cue that, in the images examined here, at first glance appears both radical and peripheral.
The Augustinian Order has also been of interest to art historians seeking to validate a nineteenth-century historiographical paradigm forwarded by Henry Thode, generally dubbed the ‘mendicant thesis'. This posits a relationship between the mendicant focus on the world as part of God's creation and the development of Renaissance interest in the representation of nature.Footnote 17 While this thesis has been the focus of much debate, few art historians have abandoned it entirely, provoking continued engagement with the art of the mendicant orders in the later Middle Ages.Footnote 18 In this vein, artwork and architecture commissioned by the mendicants has featured as an important area of study, with the Hermits often passing unnoticed or criticised as having produced images that were heavily derivative of the artwork of the other mendicants.Footnote 19 Work done in this vein tends to emphasise the conscious appropriation of Augustine by the Hermits as their founder, in an effort to gain legitimacy and prestige for their order.Footnote 20 It would certainly be remiss to ignore attempts by the Hermits to surpass their monastic rivals, but to denigrate their entire association with Augustine as political manoeuvring fundamentally misconstrues the role of Augustine as their putative founder. By neglecting the Hermits' religious engagement with Augustine and the theological tradition of Augustinianism in which they placed themselves, scholars such as Saak, Dale, Cooper and Gill have missed elements of their self-identification as the religious followers of Augustine. The use of Augustine as the founder of their order should not be perceived as a conscious mendacity by the Hermits for ecclesiastical position, but rather as part of a long-standing belief in the specifically Augustinian roots of their own religion.
More recently, Eric Saak, in his book Creating Augustine, has examined these images in the context of his hypothesis of a ‘new’ Augustine that came to the fore in the 1330s and 1340s.Footnote 21 While Saak's investigation has drawn attention to this imagery, he examines it within the context of his hypothesis of a ‘created Augustine’. This arose, according to Saak, out of a need for legitimacy in the context of the Hermits' conflicts with the Canons Regular.Footnote 22 Once again, while it is certainly important to consider the religio-political context within which these images were produced, this neglects the religious implications of the images for the Hermits. Saak is correct in asserting that the Hermits sought to appropriate Augustine's religious significance by making his character applicable to their monastic order, but it is the way in which they achieved this in the imagery examined here which is of interest.
These three images (figs 1–3) depict a much stronger version of what later became the Augustinian visual trope of heart and arrow, and merit examination within their own religious setting, as opposed to one dominated by the theology and spirituality of the Franciscans. The Hermits, like many others, saw themselves as the heirs to an intellectual and devotional tradition inaugurated by Augustine, and thus their depictions of him reveal the formulation of their own religious Augustinianism. It is this fundamental point that has largely been overlooked in studies both of the order and of Augustinianism more generally. Their depictions of Augustine, underpinned by a genuine belief in their monastic descent from the great Church Father, are necessarily informed by their interpretation of the exemplary nature of his life, and therefore reveal much about their own theology. By reinserting religious thought back into the study of the Augustinian Order's representations of their founder, a counter-balance is provided to the voices of art historians who have largely undervalued the theological implications of this iconography. An investigation of the manner in which the Hermits understood how best to follow the example of Augustine contributes to the scholarly understanding of the late medieval Augustinian Order of Hermits.
Images and context
Chronologically, the first surviving image of this sort appeared on a painted crucifix in the main church of the Hermits, the Eremitani Church, in Padua in the 1360 s, composed by Nicoletto Semitecolo (see fig. 1).Footnote 23 Eric Saak has argued that a 1324 stained glass window in the Erfurt Augustinian monastery is an earlier manifestation of this Gnadenstuhl imagery,Footnote 24 but it lacks any motif of Augustine's heart. Therefore Donal Cooper's exclusion of the Erfurt window from his study of imagery of the ecstasy of Augustine, an omission with which Saak has taken issue in his review of the volume in which Cooper's essay, appears, seems entirely correct.Footnote 25
The Semitecolo crucifix features the Trinity in the upper terminal of the crucifix and Augustine kneeling at the foot of the cross. Cooper argues that the composition is reliant upon Franciscan crucifixes, which place Francis similarly.Footnote 26 This crucifix places Augustine in direct conversation with the persons of the Trinity by his participation in the agony of the Crucifixion. Augustine is the apparent recipient of the blood of Christ, which drips down the cross from the wounds on Christ's feet onto Augustine's kneeling figure. The saint is enclosed by the inscription ‘Sanctus Augustinus Lux Doctorum’, and wears a cope (although his crosier lies on the ground), and his habit is visible, along with the leather belt typically associated with the Hermits.Footnote 27
The vestment of Augustine in this garb is certainly deliberate, given the Hermits' on-going campaign to prove that he founded their order. All three of the images discussed here endeavoured to promote an image of Augustine as a monk; the incorporation of his habit into his episcopal regalia was thus an important theme.Footnote 28 This reflects a growing belief that Augustine's baptism was a conversion to monasticism as well as to Christianity, with the habit and the belt thought to be the garb donned by Augustine once he became fully Christian.Footnote 29
On this crucifix, a slit in Augustine's habit opens to reveal a bleeding heart, which is struck by rays descending from above his head. The wound on his chest is reminiscent of the one on Christ's side, a horizontal slash, from which blood drips. In this way, Augustine mimics the suffering of Christ; he drops his crosier and assumes the more humble ecclesiastical position of a friar, experiencing a physical burden similar to that of the Passion. The pain of the crucified Christ is reflected in the injury to Augustine's own flesh, as the blood of Christ descends onto him, and melts into an outline of the halo encircling his head. Augustine's sanctity and devotion is framed by the physical suffering of Christ, as Christ both inaugurates and participates in the suffering of Augustine, who likewise strives for participation and incorporation into the Passion of Christ.
This iconography surfaces next in Tuscany in 1374.Footnote 30 In the lower nave of the Augustinian Church of San Salvatore at Lecceto, an anonymous Sienese painter composed a fresco of Augustine, John the Baptist and a lay donor (see fig. 2). The organ loft now covers the upper portion of the fresco, but Augustine's torso is still visible, where he points to a wound his chest. Augustine again wears a black habit under a cope, which opens to reveal his wounded heart. A seventeenth-century description of the fresco recounts how ‘Salvatore’ was inscribed over Augustine's head, but with this portion now covered by the organ, it is impossible to know if this was referring to the Trinity or simply to Christ.Footnote 31 He holds a scroll which reads ‘Vulnerasti cor meum de charitate tua’.Footnote 32
The words of the scroll make explicit the connotations of the iconography seen on the Semitecolo crucifix. By stating that he has been wounded by love, Augustine explains the nature of his suffering, namely that it is part of divine love and is part of his own devotion to God. Since Augustine is clad in his eremitical habit, there is a connection to be made between the Augustinian monastic life and this religious scene; by praising God through a physical laceration, one infers that this is part of his own monastic campaign.
The third extant image of the ecstasy of St Augustine appears in the 1420s, in the Church of Sant'Agostino in Gubbio.Footnote 33 In a cycle of Augustine's life in the cappella maggiore of the church, Ottaviano Nelli painted a fresco of Augustine kneeling in a chapel doorway, with his gaze fixed upon a vision of the Trinity (see fig. 3). Augustine is again in his habit with the leather belt and his mitre behind his head, so that his tonsure is revealed. By opening a slit in his habit, Augustine uncovers his wounded, bleeding heart, on which Nelli depicted a reflection of the vision of the Trinity.Footnote 34 The symbolism begun with the Semitecolo crucifix is enlarged here, as not only does the Passion encircle Augustine, but finds itself within Augustine's own chest. The Father, holding the cross of his crucified Son, seems to emerge from the opening in Augustine's habit, strikingly invoking a sort of feminine symbolism not seen elsewhere in these images. Augustine seemingly gives birth to the Trinity through an injury caused by that same Trinity. In this way, he is implicit in the cycle of creativity, and he participates in the Trinity more directly than in the two previous examples. Saak emphasises the Passion imagery of this fresco, noting that Augustine revealing his heart by an opening in his chest is reminiscent of the side-wound of Christ, supported by the appearance of this imagery on the crucifix at Padua.Footnote 35
Augustine as alter-Franciscus?
Were these images of Augustine an attempt at usurping the iconographical techniques, and the associated religious prestige of the Franciscans? Meredith Gill argues that this imagery can be equated with stigmatisation,Footnote 36 and Sharon Dale singles out Giotto's representations of Francis's stigmatisation (see fig. 4) as the most potent influence on Ottaviano Nelli, especially given Gubbio's geographical proximity to Assisi.Footnote 37 The vision of the Trinity recalls the seraph that features as the agent of the stigmatisation of Francis, and both make use of a similar diagonal composition. Since the opening of the habit in all three images is comparable to Francis revealing the wound in his side, Cooper has described the Augustine of these images as an ‘alter-Franciscus' who receives a corporeal wound from a vision of the divine.Footnote 38
(Colour online) Giotto, St Francis of Assisi receiving the stigmata, 1295–1300, Musée du Louvre.
The Hermits certainly borrowed visual and devotional language from the Friars Minor; this indicates that there were religious factors common to both orders. Scholarship that can point only to the use of Franciscan imagery by the Hermits here forms part of a campaign to paint the iconography of the Hermits as derivative of the larger mendicant orders, thereby neglecting the theological and devotional import of such imagery with regards to the order's conception of its putative founder.Footnote 39 It is more useful to understand how this imagery was applicable to the Hermits in their own right, rather than dismissing its theological significance given the chronological priority of such imagery elsewhere.
There does not appear to be one clear hagiographical source for the imagery of Augustine, as it does not have any foundation in either the Confessiones or in Possidius' Vita Augustini.Footnote 40 Jeanne and Pierre Courcelle, in their studies on the iconography of Augustine, have linked this image to a verse in book ix of the Confessiones,Footnote 41 which reads ‘Saggittaveras tu cor nostrum caritate tua et gestabamus verba tua transfixa visceribus.’ Jacopo da Voragine cited this verse twice in the Legenda aurea as evidence for Augustine's religious fervour.Footnote 42 This is echoed at Lecceto, as the singular ‘meum’ refers more specifically to Augustine, whereas the ‘vulnerasti’ in place of ‘saggittaveras' is more reflective of the stigmata.Footnote 43 It is also reminiscent of the ‘vulnerasti cor meum’ of Song of Songs iv.9, from which Augustine can be understood as the exemplary lover of Christ.Footnote 44 The Lux Doctorum inscription of Semitecolo's crucifix also comes from the Legenda aurea, which likens Augustine to the sun, fervent with the love of God, against a backdrop of the other doctors, who merely resemble stars.Footnote 45
By referencing Augustine's own words and later hagiographical sources dealing with the life of Augustine, the Hermits related their artwork specifically to the story of Augustine. This suggests that investigating their iconography uniquely through a lens of derivation is problematic; visual techniques shared with the Franciscans would only have been appropriate to the Hermits if they spoke adequately to the character of their founder. If the Hermits found it fitting to appropriate this visual language from the Franciscans, they must have identified the significance of that imagery.
According to Hans Belting's work on the images of the stigmatisation of Francis, receiving the wounds of Christ was an act of becoming the image of Christ, as described by Bonaventure in his biography of Francis when he wrote that ‘The true love of Christ turned him into that image.’Footnote 46 Francis imitated Christ not only in a theological, ethical or religious way, but also in an outward and pictorial way. By becoming a representation of the body of Christ, he functioned as the living medium for the image of Christ, which was then captured by the material medium of canvas and paint. Francis was the bodily image of bodiless God, who was embodied in Christ.Footnote 47 The body features as the main mode of representation for God – whether by the incarnation in Christ, or by the bodily imitation of Christ in Francis – and these images function both as the incorporation of the image and as the iconisation of the body. Thus, Francis's body functions not only as the medium through which he imitates Christ, but also as devotion, since the bodily wounds that he shared with Christ speak to the language of mystical union, as both Francis and the divine share in the same physical experience.
Belting's study of images of Francis's stigmatisation points to a wider religious current in the later Middle Ages, namely, an expression of religious ideas in physical, bodily terms. The tenor of Francis's interaction with the divine in the Giotto images sits well with the images of Augustine, which represent a largely similar sort of experience. While Francis experiences the wounds of Christ, Augustine bleeds at the sight of the mysterious Trinity, the object of his theological enquiry. Augustine's obsession with the nature of the Trinity here forms an element of his devotion; his contemplation leads to physical incorporation into the threefold divinity. While the Hermits are not necessarily promoting a physical experience of God (paradoxically achieved through a spiritual act of contemplation on the nature of God) as the only path to salvation, they are certainly endorsing it as a distinctly Augustinian way.
The religious body
Caroline Walker Bynum has notably argued that late medieval religion and devotion was underpinned by a paradoxical understanding of the body.Footnote 48 Before her seminal work, Holy feast and fast, earlier scholarship had traditionally seen late medieval devotion primarily in terms of the visual, as seen in the work of Bob Scribner,Footnote 49 André VauchezFootnote 50 and Edouard Dumoutet.Footnote 51 While it is certainly true that this genre of visual culture was flourishing, there is merit to Bynum's emphasis on holy matter both as a radical threat and as an opportunity in the late medieval period.Footnote 52 She is not alone in this stress on the body, with much recent scholarship focusing on the late medieval physical, such as Miri Rubin's monograph on the feast of Corpus Christi,Footnote 53 Nicholas Vincent's recent monograph on relics of Christ's blood,Footnote 54 as well as several books on sexual abstinence and ascetic renunciation.Footnote 55 This emphasis is mirrored by a renewed interest in medieval medicine and the female body.Footnote 56 This focus on the body has become a topic of discussion itself, with Rubin and Kay's volume on medieval bodies and Bynum's article on ‘the fuss about the body’ both discussing physicality as a trend in recent medieval studies.Footnote 57
In her explanation of the paradoxical role of matter, Bynum characterised the medieval religious experience as primarily a physical, bodily one.Footnote 58 The emphasis in the Middle Ages on the martyrdom of saints, self-mortification, relics and depictions of religious figures undergoing physical pain attests to the centrality of the role of the body.Footnote 59 A society in which people revered pieces of bodies as holy and manipulated their own bodies for religious goals may seem incomprehensible, but these seemingly bizarre practices reveal underlying attitudes towards piety and the body's role within it. Bynum has argued that the experience of physical pain was not a self-inflicted retribution for sin, but rather an experience of the divine.Footnote 60 As God had become man, was enfleshed, embodied, incorporated, and as his body was devotedly consumed by his worshippers, the body was a central element in medieval Christianity. Just as the body of Christ was the key to salvation, so too was the medieval body crucial for worship, since unusual bodily behaviour – either in the incarnation of Christ, the Passion, or the eucharist – formed the basis of redemption. The host functioned as a relic of Christ, which, through consumption, which Bynum calls ‘symbolic cannibalism’, was incorporated into the body of the worshipper, who thus ingests the power of the tortured god.Footnote 61 As Bynum acutely stated, ‘because they worshipped a God who became incarnate and died for their sins, they viewed all bodily events as possible manifestations of grace’.Footnote 62
According to Bynum, there is little basis for reading late medieval art as treating the body as entrapment as opposed to opportunity, or even cause, of salvation.Footnote 63 Bynum thus shows how bodily wounds in the presence of the divine can be understood as a way for medieval religiosity to be expressed, and therefore the stigmata of Francis and the wounded heart of Augustine would have been a way of participating in the unusual bodily behaviour of Christ. Receiving wounds from Christ was not only a physical imitation of Christ, but also participation in the divine act of redemption.
Interestingly, the images of Augustine in ecstasy at a vision of the Trinity, while revealing his wounded and bleeding heart, stand at a crossroads between the work of Bynum and earlier scholarship, as representative both of a physical expression of devotion and of the primacy of the visual. The images present the physical injury of Augustine as a path to salvation and as an imitation of the body of Christ. Augustine, in his wounds, experiences the unusual bodily behaviour thought to contain grace and the divine. By undergoing a similar experience to that of Christ, he approaches God, finding Christ both before and within him. Such iconography forms part of late medieval Christocentrism, manifested here as a physical expression of the desire for imitatio Christi. And yet, such corporeal devotion occurs only once Augustine has gazed upon the Trinity, and it is this vision of the divine that inspires and creates his bodily reaction.
The images of both Augustine and Francis demonstrate the power attributed to sight in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as capable of making the viewer resemble the object being seen.Footnote 64 In the images of Francis, his gaze, fixed upon the angelic apparition in front of him, results in the appearance of the stigmata on his own body. In his Vita di San Francesco, Bonaventure emphasises this relationship, writing, ‘Onde, partendosi quella vision, sì gli lasciò un mirabile ardore dell'amore per Cristo e lasco gli nel corpo suo mirabile impression di segni delle piaghe di Cristo, siccome egli aveva veduto nella predetta vision imagine d'uomo crocifisso.’Footnote 65 This relationship between vision and the body is particularly applicable to the Augustinian images seen here, since the heart has been emphasised in recent scholarship as integral to the medieval conception of vision.Footnote 66 Heather Webb speaks of vision in the Middle Ages as ‘a stamping or inscribing of images upon the heart’Footnote 67 or as ‘a transformative commingling of two reciprocal entities’.Footnote 68 Jeffrey Hamburger underlines this latter concept with his book Nuns as artists, investigating late medieval drawings in which the heart is portrayed as a house open to Christ.Footnote 69 The transformative power of sight forms the foundation for much of the salience of the images of both Augustine and Francis; through their salvific gaze, they are physically transformed into the object of their vision. For Augustine in particular, his vision of the Gnadenstuhl is marked onto his heart, which receives the vision and subsequently transforms him.
The wounds of Augustine and of Francis marked their bodies as images of God, manifesting the presence of Christ within their own bodies. Distinctively, in the case of Augustine, it was not merely the image of Christ that his body represented, but an image of the Trinity. Being wounded by a vision of the Trinity and having the image of the Trinity reflected onto his heart reflects the difference between Augustine and Francis; while both were functioning as founders of religious orders, Augustine was the intellectual, preoccupied throughout his career by the nature of the Trinity. Their bodies are behaving in similar ways in these images, but the manifestation of the wounds in Francis and Augustine is emblematic of significant differences between the two.
Although images of the stigmatisation of Francis had precedence over images of the ecstatic Augustine in terms of themes, influence and chronology, similar compositions and themes in images of Augustine retained salience for the Hermits who commissioned them. As contemporaneous monastic orders, both the Franciscans and the Hermits existed in similar religious and social contexts and, as such, were responding to analogous religious and cultural needs. The Hermits, due to the antiquity of Augustine, needed to represent their founder in a way relevant to their religious lifestyle. In need of unity within their order and so as to mark their distinctiveness from other orders, the Hermits depicted a figure that spoke directly to their own theological and devotional practice. The rational and episcopal Augustine would not have been adequate in an environment that valued bodily suffering as an experience of the divine; their religious exemplar needed to function within that framework.
By emphasising the body of Augustine, rather than his theological achievements, the Hermits understood the role of Augustine in these images through a lens of the late medieval cult of the body. It was the behaviour of the physical body of Augustine in these images that interested the Hermits, as Augustine's own body seems to serve as a devotional mediation to the body of Christ. This is certainly similar to what the Franciscans achieved in their portrayals of the stigmatisation of Francis; both groups of mendicants were interested in how the body of their founder behaved and how that behaviour related to the body of Christ. Imitatio Christi, a devotional technique significant for all mendicants with their focus on teaching, preaching and poverty, here is understood through physicality, and thus is as applicable to the Hermits as to the Franciscans. It may be tempting to see this as reliance on Giotto and the Franciscans, but this similarity may be more indicative of a wider mendicant focus on saintly bodies.
While the extent to which the Hermits engaged in some kind of late medieval cult of the body is difficult to determine, focus on the body and vision is certainly at work here. It is not necessarily appropriate to extrapolate or generalise from these three central-northern Italian images to the entire European Augustinian Eremitical Order, but there is a sense in which the Hermits felt that the physical body of their founding saint was significant. The fact that these Hermits have focused on the body of a saint who was primarily known for his mind should not be undervalued.
Augustine, a figure not traditionally conceived in such a mystical fashion, reappears here in a way exceedingly typical of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century devotion and sainthood. In this way, he could be both a charismatic historical figure and a figure relevant to the present of those who looked to him for guidance. As Belting has stated, ‘pictures can turn into artificial bodies that cannot die … they can represent us as we wish to be’.Footnote 70 Ultimately, the Hermits recast and reformed their religious father in a way that produced a distinctly eremitical Augustine, who could not only unify their order, but who could also function within their late medieval piety.
