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Norman, Diana
(2007).
URL: https://www.ashgate.com/shopping/title.asp?isbn=0%...
Abstract
This essay takes as its subject a frescoed altarpiece in the church of Sant'Agostino in Montalcino, a small but strategically important town in southern Tuscany. The essay demonstrates how the subject matter of the fresco commemorates and celebrates the life of Saint Anthony Abbot, a saint greatly favoured by the Augustinian Order because of his life as a hermit. The essay then traces the history of the recovery of this fresco in the early twentieth century and demonstrates how it once included a now almost invisible detail of a male donor being presented to Saint Anthony Abbot by an Augustinian friar. On the basis of this hitherto neglected detail,together with a detailed analysis of the distinctive imagery of the painting, the essay proposes a new hypothesis about the circumstances of the commissioning of this frescoed altarpiece, and offers a new date for the painting's execution. In addition, it places this painting within the broader context of what is already known of the kind of art favoured for Augustinian churches during that period.