Victor Stoichita offers a sensational reinterpretation of one of the most famous and at the same time one of the most enigmatic paintings of the Italian Renaissance – Vittore Carpaccio’s The Vision of St. Augustine. Carpaccio (c. 1465–1525) created the painting in the Scuola degli Schiavoni in Venice at the beginning of the 16th century, as part of an interior design cycle honoring St. Jerome.
Stoichita clarifies how Carpaccio was able to represent a telepathic miracle in the medium of painting, not only by bringing clarity to the complex iconography of the work, but also through a reanalysis of the textual sources and the thick fabric of interconnected ties between the written and painted story. His interpretation of the image also significantly changes the view of its program and the meaning of the painting cycle as a whole. The book was produced in the context of the Panofsky professorship at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich, which Victor Stoichita held in 2016.