The Agustinians

Chapter 1

Introduction: the Augustinians, the
Mendicant Orders, and Early-Renaissance
Art
Anne dunlop

In the twelfth century, the Cistercian abbot Joachim of Fiore wrote of the events that
would mark the coming of a new age. One was the emergence of a religious order: ‘an
order appears which seems to be new, but it is not. dressed in black and with a belt at
the waist, they grow andtheir fame will spread. And they will preach the faith which
they defend to the ending of the world in the spirit of Elijah. This will be the order of
the hermits emulating the life of angels’.1 In 1256, a new mendicant order was created,
the Order of Hermits of St Augustine, bringing many disparate hermit communities in
Italy under a single rule. The event was called the great union, and thebrothers took
as their habit black robes with leather belts. By the 1330s, members of their order were
arguing that Joachim of Fiore had foreseen the Augustinian hermits, and that the order
had therefore been preordained as part of god’s plan for the Second Coming. The
claim would persist into the seventeenth century.
In art history, the rise of the mendicant orders has also been cast as thebeginning
of a new age. The term ‘mendicant’ refers to five orders, the Franciscans, dominicans,
Carmelites, Servites, and Augustinians. These orders were a social and religious
revolution, and their appearance in the thirteenth century coincided with profound and
lasting changes in the visual arts. The mendicants emerged with a radically new idea of
religious vocation, though it was cast as arenewing or renovatio of the true Christian
apostolate.2 The friars argued Christ and his apostles had lived without accumulation
1 M. Reeves, ‘Joachimist Expectations in the Order of Augustinian Hermits’, Recherches
de théologie ancienne et médiévale 25 (1958), pp. 111-41. The passage comes in Joachim’s Expositio
in Apocalypsim, and concerns chapter 14: ‘Surget enim ordo qui videtur novus etnon est. Induti
nigris vestibus et accincti desuper zona, hi crescent et fama eorum devulgabitur. Et predicabunt
fidem quam et defendent usque ad mundi consumptionem in spiritu Helye. Qui erit ordo
heremitarum emulantium vitam angelorum.’ For this source, see also Kaspar Elm, ‘Augustinus
canonicus - Augustinus eremita: A Quattrocento cause célèbre’, in Christianity and the Renaissance,
eds.T. Verdon and J. Henderson (Syracuse and London, 1990), pp. 83-107.
2 For an introduction to the mendicants, see C. H. Lawrence. The Friars: The Impact of the
Early Mendicant Movement on Western Society (London, 1994); R. Brooke The Coming of the Friars
(new york, 1975); and Dizionario degli istituti di perfezioni, 10 vols (Rome, 1974-2003), vol. 5, col.
1163-1212, s. v. ‘mendicanti’. For thewider issue of poverty and church reform, see L. K. Little,
Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, 1978); and B. Bolton, The Medieval
Reformation (London, 1983).

2

Art and the Augustinian Order in Early Renaissance Italy

of property, relying on the charity of others. They therefore embraced poverty as
fundamental to the religious state, and they wereknown as ‘mendicants’ because they
chose to live by begging for alms and donations. The imitation of Christ placed teaching
and preaching at the very centre of their vocation, and unlike older monastic orders, the
mendicants were from the first an urban phenomenon, living, teaching, and preaching
in the growing cities of Europe. Commissions multiplied as churches and chapels
were founded orrebuilt for the mendicants, and artists were called upon to invent new
images and iconographies for their saints and cults. In the wake of the social history of
art, with its emphasis on the institutional politics of art production and interpretation,
what might be called the ‘mendicant thesis’ can be found in much art-historical writing
about medieval and early-modern Europe. This argues that...