ARTH101: Art Appreciation

Masaccio was the first painter in the Renaissance to incorporate Brunelleschi's discovery in his art. He did this in his fresco called the Holy Trinity, in Santa Maria Novella, in Florence.

Masaccio's Holy Trinity, 1425-28. Santa Maria Novella, Florence

Have a close look at the painting and at this perspective diagram. You see the orthogonals in the lines that form the coffers in the ceiling of the barrel vault (look for diagonal lines that appear to recede into the distance). Because Masaccio painted from a low viewpoint, as though we were looking up at Christ, we see the orthogonals in the ceiling, and if we traced all of the orthogonals the vanishing point would be below the base of the cross.

Perspective diagram of Masaccio's Holy Trinity

My favorite part of this fresco is God's feet. Actually, you can only really see one of them. Think about this for a moment. God is standing in this painting. Doesn't that strike you as odd just a little bit? This may not strike you all that much when you first think about it because our idea of God, our picture of God in our mind's eye, as an old man with a beard, is very much based on Renaissance images of God. So, here Masaccio imagines God as a man. Not a force or power or something abstract, but as a man. A man who stands – his feet are foreshortened, and he weighs something and is capable of walking! In medieval art, God was often represented by a hand, just a hand, as though God was an abstract force or power in our lives, but here he seems so much like a flesh and blood man. This is a good indication of Humanism in the Renaissance.

Masaccio's contemporaries were struck by the palpable realism of this fresco, as was Vasari, who lived over one hundred years later. Vasari wrote that "the most beautiful thing, apart from the figures, is the barrel-vaulted ceiling drawn in perspective and divided into square compartments containing rosettes foreshortened and made to recede so skilfully that the surface looks as if it is indented."

The Architecture

One of the other amazing things about this painting is the use of classical architecture (from ancient Greece and Rome). Masaccio borrowed much of what we see from ancient Roman architecture and may have been helped by Brunelleschi. Study the diagram below to help identify the different architectural elements.

• Coffers: the indented squares that decorate the ceiling.
  
  
• Column: a round, supporting element in architecture. In this painting, we see an attached column.
  
  
• Pilasters: a shallow, flattened column attached to a wall. It is only decorative and has no supporting function.
  
  
• Barrel Vault: "vault" means ceiling. A barrel vault is a ceiling in the shape of a round arch.
  
  
• Iconic and Corinthian Capitals: a "capital" is the decorated top of a column or pilaster. An ionic capital has a scroll shape (like the ones on the attached columns in the painting), and a Corinthian capital has leaf shapes.
  
  
• Fluting: the vertical, indented lines or grooves that decorate the pilasters in the painting. Fluting can also be used on a column.
  
  

Elements of ancient architecture in Masaccio's Holy Trinity

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Source: Smarthistory, smarthistory.org
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