St Augustine Departing for Milan (scene 7, south wall)

St Augustine Departing for Milan is scene 7 on the south wall of the Sant'Agostino cycle in San Gimignano, painted by Benozzo Gozzoli in 1464. The scene depicts a key episode in Augustine's intellectual biography: his departure from Carthage, where he had been teaching rhetoric, for Milan, where he would come under the influence of Bishop Ambrose and eventually be baptized into Christianity. Gozzoli narrates Augustine's life with the same bustling, anecdote-rich approach he brought to his earlier Florentine and Pisan fresco cycles, filling the scene with horses, attendants, and architectural details that make the fifth-century event feel like a contemporary Tuscan procession.

The procession format — figures moving laterally across the fresco surface — is one Gozzoli had mastered in his earlier work and deploys here with great confidence. The horses are rendered with particular care, their muscular forms and varied poses reflecting the painter's observation of actual animals. Architectural elements in the background use foreshortening to suggest depth while keeping the narrative foreground legible.