St. John the Evangelist with St. Augustine. A dome pendentive

The depiction of St. John the Evangelist with Augustine is very significant, the two are involved in a intense and absorbed conversation inter pares, with gesture mimicry and eyes contact that does not appear casual. They are careless of what happens around them and the topics that animate their conversation seem not few, so much so that they accompany the impetus of the words with the gesture of the hands that it is possible to interpret by John as the indication of the three divine Persons of the Trinity, by Augustine instead as clarification, through the finger, of the unique identity of the same. The theme that repeatedly reverberates almost everywhere in the pictorial decorations carried out by Correggio returns without surprising us: that of the Augustinian warning, aimed at the unification of the earthly city with the celestial one, in favor of universal harmony.