The Vision of Saint Augustine by Filippo Lippi

The Vision of Saint Augustine by Filippo Lippi (c. 1460)

A child with a spoon

Saint Augustine is out of doors. He stands at the left of this long, low panel in a bishop's white mitre and a rose-coloured cope edged with gold over a white robe, with a long grey beard and a large gold halo. One hand rests on a stone block beside him, as if he has just risen from it; the other reaches out towards a small figure on the ground a few steps away.

The figure is a child with a gold halo, in a dark green-grey tunic, half kneeling and half lying on the bank of a stream. In one hand he holds a spoon, down by a small hollow in the ground; the other arm is flung up towards the saint. The stream runs away from him on the right through a narrow, steep-sided channel.

The story

The State Hermitage Museum, which owns the panel, gives the legend it follows. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo and one of the Fathers of the Church, was walking by the seashore trying to understand the doctrine of the Trinity when he saw a small boy taking water from the sea with a spoon and pouring it into a hole. Asked what he was doing, the child answered that trying to grasp the nature of God with the human mind was as hopeless as trying to empty the sea with a spoon, and then vanished.

The Hermitage suggests that Lippi may have been the first painter to take up this rare subject. He did not paint a sea. In its place is the stream, and around it are the hills of his native Tuscany: bare slopes and rocky banks, dark pines, a bare tree at the right. Far off at the left a river bends past the towers of a small town. The hills and trees are small against the two figures and the horizon is set high, so the landscape seems to climb up the panel behind them.

The Trinity in the corner

In the upper right corner, at the end of the stream's valley, is a dark sun with wavy rays, and in it three faces joined into one head. The Hermitage identifies this three-faced sun as a symbol of the Trinity: the mystery Augustine has been trying to think through appears in the sky above the scene, while the child tells him it cannot be contained.

Where the panel came from

The Hermitage says only that the panel was originally part of an altarpiece. It is small, painted in tempera on wood and measuring 28 by 51.5 centimetres, and its long shape suits a predella, the strip of small scenes along the base of an altarpiece. The Russian Wikipedia article on the painting describes it as a predella panel for Pesellino's altarpiece of the Trinity, which Lippi finished in 1458–60 after Pesellino's death in 1457. The English Wikipedia article on that altarpiece, commissioned in 1455 for the church of Santa Trinità in Pistoia and now in the National Gallery, London, disagrees: it records that the Hermitage panel was once thought to belong to its predella but is no longer thought to do so. The Hermitage dates the painting about 1460.

Filippo Lippi was born in Florence in 1406 and died at Spoleto in 1469.

How it reached Saint Petersburg

According to the Russian Wikipedia article, by the mid-nineteenth century the panel belonged to Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna and hung in her villa near Florence; on her death in 1876 it passed to her daughter, Evgenia Maximilianovna of Leuchtenberg, who had married into the house of Oldenburg and took it to Saint Petersburg. The Hermitage records that it entered the museum in 1917 from the collection of Princess E. M. Oldenburgskaya. Its inventory number is ГЭ-5511.

About this print

Made from a photograph of the whole panel in its wide format, which leaves the landscape its full width: the saint at one end, the stream and the three-faced sun at the other.

Sources: State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, ГЭ-5511 (hermitagemuseum.org/digital-collection/29497) · Wikimedia Commons, File:Lippi,_apparizione_del_bambino_a_sant'agostino.jpg · Wikidata Q4014780 · Wikipedia (Russian), "Видение блаженного Августина (картина Липпи)" · Wikipedia, "Pistoia Santa Trinità Altarpiece" · Web Gallery of Art, Fra Filippo Lippi (artist dates)