Toward a New Model of Renaissance Anachronism

The Venetian paiTitcr Vittore Carpaccio picttired Saint Atigustine seated at a table in a roomy study, pausing, his pen raised from the paper. Augustine is writing a letter to Saint Jerome asking the older man for advice and at that vcr> moment, in distant Bethlehem, Jerome dies, .\ugiistine looks up from his desk, as his room fills with light and an ineffable fragrance, and he hears the voice of Jeiome. Carpaccio painted the picture about 1503 for the Confraternity of S. Ciiorgio degli Schiavoni in Venice, where it still hangs today (Fig. 1). It is a historical picture, re-creating an incident supposedly nai rated by Augustine himself in a spurious letter frequently published in late-fifteenth-centiir\ Venice as a siipplenieut to biographies of Saint Jerome.' The fluttering pages ofthe open codices, the fall ofthe shadows, the alerted dog, the poised pen all suggest the inomentariness of that moment, the evening hour of compline, as Augustine tells us. This is secular time, the time of lived experience, whose each moment repeats but differs from the previous moment. The saecuhim is measured out against a completely different temporality, the time frame of peifect understanding. Augustine had been planning a treatise on the joys ofthe blessed and was writing lo |erome lor gtiidance on the topic. However, his letter was badly placed in secular time and would never reach its addre.ssee. Instead, at the moment he put the salutation down on pa[)er, Augustine reports, Jerome's voice came to him from that place of the blessed to chastise him for his hubris in attempting to reason about what was beyond his (omprehension. "By what measure." Jerome asked, "will you measure the immense?"