Bekehrung des heiligen Augustinus

Some time in the 18th or early 19th century a dealer took a long horizontal panel painted around 1430 by Fra Angelico and sawed it into six pieces to sell. This is one of them. The whole panel had shown a Thebaid, the Egyptian desert crowded with hermits, a subject Florentine painters liked because it let them scatter dozens of separate stories across one landscape. The scene here is Augustine in a garden in Milan in the year 386, hearing a child's voice tell him to take up and read. He sits on the ground with both hands over his face. The book lies on the grass by his feet, the fig tree stands beside him, and his friend Alypius waits by the house in a red hood, watching. Fra Angelico was a Dominican friar, and Dominicans live under the rule Augustine wrote. The fragment reached Cherbourg with the 163 paintings Thomas Henry gave the town in the 1830s.