Augustine’s dog

• Autores: Meredith J. Gill
• Localización: Artibus et historiae: an art anthology, ISSN 0391-9064, Nº. 87, 2023, págs. 47-61
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • In c. 1502, Vittore Carpaccio painted Saint Augustine in His Study among a series of narratives for the Venetian Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni. A small, white dog, sitting on the floor of a room furnished with books, artifacts, and scientific instruments, shares his master’s rapt attention to a light coming through a window. The dog has been linked to ancient and Early Modern meditations on the scholar-humanist’s ideal companion and emblem, and to a longstanding understanding that dogs, by means of their special senses, are registers of the supernatural. Augustine’s companion may also be associated, by way of his classification, with Aristotelian circles in fifteenth-century Venice. He may offer further evidence not only for the possibility that Augustine bears something of the likeness of the Greek Cardinal Basilius (Johannes) Bessarion (1403–1472), but also that his particular canine breed supplies a rationale, by way of Aristotle, for the hitherto enigmatic creature in Carpaccio’s preliminary drawing