Augustinian Art and Meditation in Renaissance Florence: The Choir Altarpieces of Santo Spirito 1480-1510

In Augustinian Art and Meditation in Renaissance Florence, Antonia Fondaras reunites the fifteenth-century altarpieces painted by Botticelli, Piero di Cosimo, Filippino Lippi, and other masters for the choir of the Augustinian church of Santo Spirito in Florence. Departing from a conventional focus on artist and patron, the author illuminates the engagement of the Augustinian Hermit friars with the composition and iconography of these pictures, and discusses how they were used to fashion the choir into a space suited to the friars’ institutional and spiritual ideals.

Fondaras includes a close reading of the choir’s most compelling and original altarpieces, which were grounded in the writings of Augustine and provided a focal point for the friars’ sophisticated meditative practices.