Saint Augustine

Nowadays the painter Antonio Rodríguez is considered a secondary figure in neo-Hispanic art, eclipsed by the talent of his teacher, José Juárez and the latter’s sons, Juan and Nicolás Rodríguez Juárez. Nevertheless, it should be pointed out that he earned the praise of his contemporaries, even being referred to as "the Titian of the New World" by one of them. The work depicts the moment when Saint Augustine has a vision of Christ and the Virgin who are offering him twin streams of blood and milk as holy food to nourish the inspiration of his writing. Saint Augustine is shown seated at a desk wearing a black habit which sets off his face and hands, a portrayal founded in the rhetorical device of the body as a symbol of mystic ecstasy. Rodríguez stresses the saint's activities as a writer, upon whose calm the heavenly vision bursts in the form of a bright diagonal streak running from the upper right-hand corner to the bottom left-hand corner. In this latter area there is an open book, betokening human wisdom, to which the holy man, whose gaze is fixed on the Virgin and her Son, is oblivious. His choice reflects a renouncing of the wisdom to be found in books, since all his attention is focused on a higher, more momentous kind of wisdom, divine revelation. The painting endeavors to depict the type of understanding that the bishop of Hippo developed about divine matters, showing him drinking milk from the Virgin's breast and blood from Christ's open wound, a trope taken from a portrayal that revolved around the Latin word sapere, which refers both to the act of savoring and to that of knowing. This work passed to the MUNAL from the San Diego Viceregal Painting Gallery in the year 2000.