Editor’s Note

Abstract

The cover for this issue features a predella panel from the Berenson collection by the Sienese artist Matteo di Giovanni of a young Augustine in elegant dress, eyes closed, a book in his hand (fig. 1). We find him in desolate terrain, albeit marked by an elaborate architectural structure emitting from one of its windows a heavenly light. Kneeling in prayer not far from her son is Augustine’s mother, Monica, her gaze steadily focused on the drowsy young man. In this quasi-mystical space— the stony slabs make one think of Jerome’s or Anthony’s time in the desert—Matteo gives us the moment just before Augustine’s eyes fall on the passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans, in which the apostle counsels his readers to “put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh in its concupiscence” (Rom. 13: 13–4). This is thus the setting of conversion, even if it is hardly the “Milanese garden” of the Confessions, where Augustine hears the voice telling him to “tolle, lege”—take and read the words of the Bible randomly opened before him. Painted for the church of Sant’Agostino in the little town of Asciano around 1474, this is the only surviving panel from the predella to Matteo’s altarpiece of Mary’s assumption—another exemplary mother awakening sons and daughters to the possibility of a new life as she rises majestically from the open tomb. Augustine’s open book, particularly one opened randomly to a phrase, hearkens back to the Sortes Vergilianae. But by the time of Matteo’s panel, it would have had less “pagan” overtones. In her essay in this issue on the Borgherini chapel in Rome, Marsha Libina calls attention to a phrase on a curled piece of parchment from Sebastiano del Piombo’s painting: “it will be opened in time” (aperietur in tempore). Libina notes that the Confessions itself ends with the phrase “sic aperietur” (it shall be opened), and that Augustine uses the verb for opening throughout his text. Or, as Libina writes, in Book VI, Ambrose “opened (aperiret) the true, spiritual meaning of certain pas-