When the Vespucci family commissioned restoration work on the “Sant’Agostino” frescoes in the church of Ognisanti, the restorers noticed an odd detail: the saint, shown in the canonical manner of the humanism of the day in his own studio, was packed with A booklet devoted to geometry is included in the upper portion of the fresco among other books and items. You may view prisms and triangles with text on the open pages.
Since the artist only drew enough lines to suggest writing from a distance, the text is not readable. You can easily make out roughly fifteen words at one point in the text, just at the top of a little cross: “Where is between Martino? He took off running. Where did he go, anyway? He exited through the entrance and into the grass.
Probably spending many hours in the church to fresco his walls, the artist saw the friar’s “escapades” and, being a joker by nature, could not resist the urge to criticize them on the same picture. In order for the transient friar to know that his misadventures were not forgotten, Botticelli added a cross as a point of reference to the text.
