Holy Trinity (c.1426), Masaccio (Italian, 1401 – 1428)
Basilica di Santa Maria Novella, Florence
During restoration work it will be possible to admire closely the great and wonderful Masaccio’s Holy Trinity up close for the first time ever and see the restorers at work!
Tommaso Guidi, known as Masaccio, was born in San Giovanni Valdarno, a village between Arezzo and Florence, on 21 December 1401. Already by October of 1418 he was working as a painter and living in Florence. Since the oldest sources report that he died at twenty-six or twenty-seven years of age, the year of his death is probably 1428.
Around 1427 Masaccio won a prestigious commission to produce a Holy Trinity for the Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence. Probably the donor is represented to the left of the Virgin in the painting, while his wife is right of St. John the Evangelist. The fresco, considered by many to be Masaccio’s masterwork, is the earliest surviving painting to use systematic linear perspective, possibly devised by Masaccio with the assistance of Brunelleschi.
Masaccio started by producing a rough drawing of the composition and perspective lines on the wall. The drawing was covered with fresh plaster for making the fresco. To ensure the precise transfer of the perspective lines from the sketch to the plaster, Masaccio inserted a nail in at the vanishing point under the base of the cross and attached strings to it, which he pressed in (or carved into) the plaster. The marks of the preparatory works are still visible.
The sacred figures and the donors are represented above an image of a skeleton lying on a sarcophagus. An inscription seemingly carved into the wall above the skeleton reads: “Io fui gia quel che voi siete e quel ch’io sono voi anco sarete” (I once was what now you are and what I am, you shall yet be). This skeleton is a reminder to viewers that their time on earth is transitory. It is only through faith in the Trinity, the fresco suggests, that one overcomes this death. The Holy Spirit is seen in the form of a dove, above Jesus.
In 1570 Giorgio Vasari covered the fresco with a stone altar and a painting. The Holy Trinity fresco was rediscovered in good condition during an 18th century restoration of the Church. It was removed from the wall and reassembled on the inner wall of the facade. When another restoration was undertaken in 1952 the skeleton painted by Masaccio at the bottom of the Holy Trinity fresco was discovered and then the Holy Trinity fresco was put back in its original place.
