Vittore Carpaccio Ep2: St. Augustine in His Study

Next up in our tour of Vittore Carpaccio is Saint Augustine in His Study. Carpaccio was a specialist in creating series of huge paintings designed to hang in sequence to tell the story of a saint or other Biblical story and “St. Augustine” is one of these. 

We’ll find out how an unexpected visitor told the saint to get over himself, how Carpaccio created an immersive media experience in a Venetian meetinghouse, and how a dog beat out a weasel for a role in this scene. 

Here’s Carpaccio’s drawing showing his initial idea for the painting using the ermine.

SHOW NOTES (TRANSCRIPT BELOW)

“A Long Look” theme is “Ascension” by Ron Gelinas https://youtu.be/jGEdNSNkZoo

Episode music is “Sheep May Safely Graze – BWV 208” and “Lone Harvest”  by Kevin MacLeod  https://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/music.html. Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Exhibition information 
https://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2022/carpaccio-renaissance-venice.html

Artwork information
Vittore Carpaccio: Master Storyteller of Renaissance Venice by Peter Humphrey et al. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022.

St. Augustine bio
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Augustine

Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni tour (starts at 4:55)
https://aur.edu/dalmatian-school-venice-professor-jason-cardone

Words of Jerome to Augustine (Requires JSTOR login)
Roberts, Helen I. “St. Augustine in ‘St. Jerome’s Study’: Carpaccio’s Painting and Its Legendary Source.” The Art Bulletin 41, no. 4 (1959): pg 292. https://doi.org/10.2307/3047853.

Post comments or questions at alonglookpodcast.com

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to A Long Look! I’m your host, Karen Jackson

Did you know most people spend only a few seconds looking at works of art? But what happens if you slow down and take a long look? 

This season we’ll find out by looking at the works of Vittore Carpaccio, the star of a fantastic exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC called Vittore Carpaccio: Master Storyteller of Renaissance Venice, now on view through Feb. 12, 2023.

MUSIC

Today I’m looking at Saint Augustine in His Study. If you want to follow along, you can find it at alonglookpodcast.com/study. 

So what do you first notice?

An adorable tiny white dog with pert little ears and a pointed snout.

This fluffy pooch sits on the floor of a large room in this oil painting. It faces our right and looks up at a man seated at a table who’s bathed in golden light coming from a window next to him. The dog is on the left and the man is on the right. He looks like he’s been interrupted while writing, with a pen raised in his right hand, on our left, and turns his head to our right to see what’s happening out the window. He sits facing us from behind a long table sitting on a platform a couple of inches high that’s covered with a pea-green carpet. Books, papers, and cedar-red boxes are piled up across the tabletop, the bench he’s sitting on, and scattered around the platform, along with a few sheets of music. He is St. Augustine and he has pale skin with short brown hair, mustache and beard. Augustine wears a short, chocolate-brown cape draped over a long, loose-fitting white garment with a tomato-red hem. 

He and the dog sit close to us in the foreground with the rest of the room receding back toward two wooden doorways and a curved recess on the back wall, all underneath a patterned dark green and gold ceiling. The shadowy, emerald-green wall next to Augustine, on our right, has two slashes of golden yellow that suggest two more windows glowing with whatever’s outside. A hollow globe made of bronze-colored strips hangs from the ceiling near him and a narrow ledge divides the wall in half. There are all kinds of pots and what look like vases with narrow necks sitting on it. 

The left side of the room is bathed in that warm light and that wall is also divided by a ledge crammed with more pots, pointed objects, and a couple of bronze classical figurines. The bottom half of the wall is moss green and the top is off-white. A long bookshelf above the ledge is lined with what look like magazines with red, blue, green, and yellow covers. It reminds me of the newsstands you see in train stations! Finally, a mahogany-red chair and lectern sit on the floor below, just beyond the dog. 

Carpaccio must have had a sense of humor b/c he’s got these funky looking arms extending out high on these walls. They’re thick and copper-colored, sort of furry-looking with wide bases for candles gripped in their fists. A curator leading a tour I went on called them “yeti arms!”

The arched recess in the back has a dusty rose background and a curved gold ceiling. It contains an altar with a statue of Jesus, a pointed white hat called a bishop’s mitre, and two candlesticks. A tall staff with a spiraled top leans against the side of the arch and the two doorways are on either side. They are surrounded by wooden frames with elaborately carved pointed tops. The door on the left opens onto a small sunlit room where a table covered with a scarlet-red cloth holds a carousel displaying open books.  

MUSIC

St Augustine was a bishop in Hippo, a city in North Africa but Carpaccio places him in the Venice of his time, the early 1500s. It was popular to set religious stories in Venice, so even though a lot of the objects in the room were things Augustine wouldn’t have had in the 5th century, a stylish Venetian intellectual might have. But all of those scientific instruments and objects and books from all over are meant to tell us that Augustine was a very curious guy who loved learning. 

He was a disciple of St. Jerome and they were both prolific writers who developed a lot of the major ideas that would become Christine doctrine. Jerome was especially famous for translating the Bible into Latin, which made it more widely available in the Roman world. 

That golden light coming through his window is the spirit of St. Jerome who has just died. Augustine wrote about this experience and describes being in his study, about to write a letter to Jerome when he was suddenly flooded with what he calls “an indescribable light, not seen in our times” and “an ineffable and unknown fragrance, of all odors.”  It’s Jerome coming to tell him that he’s died and gone to heaven. But first, he starts out by scolding Augustine! Augustine was writing to Jerome for advice on an essay he wanted to do about the experience of people who have gone to heaven. Jerome tells him that he’s being really presumptuous to think he can even imagine what that’s like, he’s just a mere mortal. Considering he’s IN heaven, I think Jerome wins that argument. 

This painting is part of a series done for the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni [skee-ah-VOHN-ee]—also known as the Dalmatian School—for their meetinghouse in Venice. Carpaccio was famous for these series, called cycles. A story from the Bible or the lives of the saints would be broken up into individual paintings that were displayed in sequence to tell the story, like scenes in a movie. 

The scuolae were civic groups who helped their communities by performing religious or social functions or providing economic help. This group was founded by people who had emigrated from the coast of the Balkan peninsula right across the Adriatic sea from Venice. They were known as Dalmations or Slavs which in Italian is Schiavoni. 

The painting was one of nine Carpaccio was commissioned to paint by the Dalmatians. They hang just above eye-level and wrap from left to right around a room on the ground floor of the group’s meetinghouse. The cycle shows stories about Christ and their patron saints–St. George, St. Jerome, and St. Tryphon. This scene of Jerome visiting Augustine, who was his disciple, comes at the very end of his story. I found a lecture by a professor at the American University of Rome who created a great 360 video of the scuola so you can see how St. Augustine looks in place. I’ll include it in the show notes.

I know I said the dog was the first thing I noticed, but seriously, when I walked into the dimly lit room where this hangs, its rich, incredible, jewel-tone colors just made me gasp. Kudos to the exhibition staff for creating a great moment. 

About that dog… it turns out there originally was a weasel-looking animal in that spot called an ermine. You can see it in a drawing Carpaccio did while working out the scene that hangs next to the painting. Instead he painted over the ermine and replaced it with the pup which has been identified as either a German Spitz or a Maltese. One theory is C included the dog b/c dogs were thought to be sensitive to supernatural phenomenon and since it’s looking toward the light of Jerome, he could be reinforcing that idea.

OUTRO:

I hope you’ll try out a long look on your next museum visit! Just take a little time and let the art reveal itself.

And btw, if you’re into Italian politics, business, or culture, check out my friends at the US-Italy Global Affairs Forum. The forum is dedicated to promoting dialogue and coverage of issues that affect the United States-Italy relationship. Check out usitalyforum.com.

You can find links to today’s information in the show notes at alonglookpodcast.com and in most podcast apps. If you don’t want to miss an episode, you can find player links on the site or just hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you listen to podcasts! 

A Long Look is taking a break for the holidays and will return in early Jan. so stay tuned! Thanks for joining me!