Vision of St Augustine

Augustine sits in his study, the bishop of Hippo at his writing desk, and the vision that reaches him is oddly literal. The Trinity appears as three small cherub heads joined together, and from them three golden arrows fly across the room and strike him in the heart. The image comes from his own words, the line where he tells God you have pierced my heart with your love. Lippi paints that sentence as an actual event, arrows and all. Around the saint is the tidy clutter of a scholar's room, the books and shelves a 15th-century Florentine would recognise, since a learned man's study looked much the same in Lippi's own day.