The Reception of Bartolomeo Bermejo’s Saint Augustine

The Art Institute of Chicago’s St. Augustine (oil on panel) is a universally accepted work by the Spanish artist Bartolome Bermejo. Painted around 1475, the writing saint has been identified as various Benedictine saints and St. Augustine, but these proposals are problematic because they do not take into account all of the iconographic elements within the panel or early Renaissance liturgical practices. This essay will examine the many iconographic details of the panel and consider the surviving archival materials, including an original contract for an ecclesiastically similar figure, Sto. Domingo de Silos by Bermejo. Uncommon ecclesiastical circumstances of Sto. Domingo de Silos in Daraco found in a papal document mirror those found in St. Benedict’s foundation in Monte Cassino. These iconogaphic and textual studies in coordination with an understanding of contemporary liturgical and Benedictine practices will reveal that St. Benedict is the single figure whose personal and ecclesiastical life most closely corresponds to the evidence in the Chicago panel.