Masaccio’s Holy Trinity: A Renaissance Masterpiece in Perspective
The work represents the Trinity (God the Father, Jesus on the cross and the Holy Spirit dove-shaped) with the Virgin and St. John under the cross, and donors-a merchant and his wife kneeling. Instead of the sensitivity of the International Gothic , we see heavy and solid figures, instead of smooth curves, strong angular shapes, and, instead of small details like flowers and precious stones, majestically austere architecture .. Maybe the figures were less pleasing to the eye than those to which they were accustomed, but they were much more sincere and emotional. – The simple gesture of the Virgin pointing to the Son on the cross is very eloquent and impressive because it is the only movement in the solemn assembly of the paint. His figures indeed look like statues, which is enhanced by the perspective of the framework that fits. –
Composition —
For consistency with the conceptual meaning of the fresco. This represents the Trinity , Whose symbol is the triangle, and the composition is carefully inscribed in a triangle.
But if the painter had wished to express by symbols would not be limited to the triangle involving the disposition of the figures. The symbol, which so often resorted Trecento painting, no longer interested in Masaccio:
interested in the idea, and it does not communicate through symbols, but through very clear ways.
The Trinity is an idea, dogma, and no dogma without disclosure or disclosure without form. In its eternity, the dogma is also history, and therefore the figures, even the Father, are real and historical figures “occupy space. “But the space is revealed and specifically with the dogma must be a real space, certain, absolute, historical (ie, former and current) as the dogma itself, and this space is for Masaccio, the Prospective space Brunelleschi’s architecture. – the lighting and perspective pictorial relate to real world and how to put donors in a lower step in front of the chapel, Masaccio intended to indicate that are on our side the wall of the church, just inside the space and light of the ship. – The architecture is illuminated from the left, or from the southwest, which is where the light is predominant in the general body of the ship. In terms pictorial, the only possible gap that could allow passage of light in the chapel of the Trinity is the arc through which we see the fresco, which could create the impression that the interior lighting should simulate foreign origin ( …): what was new in this case is the concept of pictorial light understood as an extension of light in the church, making it unable to circulate freely anywhere in the pictorial space to be conditioned by the distance in this respect to the false opening. – The polychrome terracotta and appears in pink and blue in the coffers of the dome, by combining these colors with pink, red and dark blue dresses, Masaccio strikes a balance abstract but rooted in their order with material things, clothes, stone and terracotta.
At the time he painted this fresco painter Masaccio was a young and absolutely current. That is why one of the most powerful families in Florence after the Medicis will charge its realization in a language that nobody yet had the opportunity to contemplate. Opposite the flat image of Italian Gothic, which blocks the view on the surface through the golden background, which Masaccio and the painters of his generation was raised more or less to open a window on a supposed imaginary pictorial reality. Had managed to abstract the human eye to provide a rational world order visible, So in this table pretending to open a real chapel with its altar and all, which takes place before the true mystery of the Trinity. In the classic first placed the altar that was built in the side chapels of the cathedral Mediterranean. It opens up a niche, with a grave where the figure of a skeleton is surrounded by an inscription that reads:
“I was what you are and be what I am.”
In this area appear donors, gonfalonier, the highest civic office, wearing red, and his wife. This represents a complete break with previous art, which adjudicates donors smaller size of divine figures in view of their lower status in the theocratic conception of the world. Here, however, respect the newly implemented laws of perspective and proportion to raise two life-size figures, similar to that of the divine character, and painted in a curve by taking into account the gaze of the faithful, who looks from the soil.
However, there is a difference in the level of the hierarchy of the donor and the saints, but is expressed in a different language: after opening a donors alleged royal chapel where the Virgin and St. John mourning at the foot of the cross, where Christ appears on an axis with the dove of the Holy Spirit and the figure of God the Father.
The views to each other are different point of view from below for donors, who pretend to belong to the real space of the spectator. Front view of the Christian mystery, which thus acquires a supernatural space. The intention of actually providing resources such as Masaccio chiaroscuro, which provides light and shadow rather than a flat bottom, and a deft handling of textures and tonal ranges to give tangibility and solidity to the body. -Not only are the manifesto of the new Renaissance painting in the chapel but is represented as the cornerstones of the new architecture based on Roman and Roman Italy. Still, Masaccio translates a rabbit at the time, which is the number of the coffered dome, peers, while in Rome always carried out in an odd number.