Pacino di Bonaguida, page from the laudario of the compagnia di sant'agnese

The iconographic forms just surveyed constitute the conventional visual language available to Christian artists for portraying the Trinity. We are now in a position to see how these elements are put to work in the hands of an artist with complete mastery of the tradition. We are fortunate that a precious 14^th-century work has survived which acts as a kind of summation of iconographic reflection on the Trinity. The illustration in question (see next page) is a leaf cut from a laudario or hymnal, as is evident from the lyrics ("Alta Trinita Beata") and musical notation under the central image. This work is in the collection of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. For an illuminated manuscript, it is large: 17 inches tall and 13 inches wide. Its exceptional size is the result of its intended use: a small group of singers had to be able to see it at the same time.

The dominant color of the piece is yellow, but blues and reds are used for most of the figures and floral forms. Indeed, the delicate color usage is among the chief charms of the piece, especially as the various paint tones play against the bare page and the subtle contrast of the gold leaf directly adjacent to the yellow painted areas. The central image is the Lord seated in a round aureole (a kind of full-body nimbus), surrounded by angels, above a modest green semi-circle representing the earth. At the four corners of the page are circular framing devices known as medallions or oculi. In each of the four oculi is a tiny representation of the Trinity, which we can identify according to the typology already established. The two images on the left side of the page are (top left) a philoxenia, showing Abraham kneeling before the three standing angels, and (bottom left) a eucharistic table behind which are seated three identical figures of Christ. As we have already seen, these two images are closely associated and may in fact both derive from the philoxenia schema. On the left side are (top right) a Throne of Grace image with the dove of the Holy Spirit above the Father’s head, and finally, (bottom right) a tricephalous Trinity seated on a throne repeating the pose of the main central figure. A fifth oculus at the bottom center portrays a worshiper, probably representing the patrons.

This page was produced around 1330 in Florence, by Pacino di Bonaguida. Although his is no longer a name on every tongue, Pacino was a famous painter in his own time. For us, his work is understandably obscured in the deep shadows cast by those two artistic mountains known as Giotto and Fra Angelico. Standing between those two giants, a painter would have to be very tall indeed to be noticed. Nevertheless, Pacino was one of the most productive and sought-after of artists in Italy during the early fourteenth century. He was the master of a painting workshop during this period of the early Renaissance, when there was money for artistic commissions and an unparalleled demand for high quality work. Along with the new buildings and massive fresco programs of the period, there arose a great demand for new devotional books. Pacino worked in many of the standard Renaissance media, but his forté was manuscript illumination. Within his lifetime he came to dominate this field. When we think of "the Florentine style" with its balanced, symmetrical page designs, its decorative vocabulary of floral fantasias, and its bright, disciplined palette, it is chiefly Pacino’s vision that we are calling to mind.

Given the revolution of visual sensibilities that Giotto was carrying out at precisely this same time, Pacino di Bonaguida’s work seems decidedly conservative. Certainly his painting has the look of someone living in the same visual culture as Giotto: the forms are delicately modeled with light and shadow, and occasionally the hierarchical figures will find themselves moving around in a landscape that approximates the solid world, or under a piece of consistent architecture. The angels on the edges of the page are certainly not posed in a way that could be described as Byzantine. But Pacino only toyed with Giotto’s great experimental program. That project was an innovation --the decisive innovation of the epoch-- and Pacino was not by nature an innovator. He studied his favorite models (whether Byzantine or early Italian), gathered his many influences, and produced beautiful decorations, on commission, for his patrons. But the intimate size of his compositions lent itself to certain concentrations of artistic energy which repay close attention. He worked in miniature, and produced miniature masterpieces. We see it in the beauty of the color and form of his pages, but we also see it in his use of received iconography.

A glance at Pacino’s panel paintings shows his facility with the visual language of Christian thought. His most famous work is the Tree of Life in the Academia in Florence, a large crucifixion panel wherein the cross grows out of a garden of Eden scene which narrates the Fall of Adam and Eve. The massive cross blossoms into twelve branches. Among these branches are 47 separate medallions, each containing a traditional image from the life of Christ, arranged in rough chronological order from bottom to top. Thus arranged, the mysteries of Christ’s life stretch from the Fall up to the coronation of the virgin at the top of the image. Without undertaking a detailed exegesis of the painting (many of the medallions are associated in counter-intuitive ways), we can see readily enough that Pacino has the ability to bring a profusion of traditional scenes into an overarching systematic arrangement, setting up a fruitful dialogue between the whole and each of its parts. In this he is a true citizen of the high middle ages, exercising the powerful synthetic imagination whose other cultural artifacts include the great cathedrals, the Summa Theologiae (left uncompleted in 1274), and the Divine Comedy (1321). Pacino’s facility with imagery can also be seen in a portable triptych altar, the Chiarrito Tabernacle, in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Among the many arresting juxtapositions of this altarpiece is a remarkable blending of word and sacrament: In the central panel, a beam of light from the mouth of the ascended Christ makes its way to the communion host just as it enters the mouth of the celebrant in the register below, while on one of the altar’s wings, blood from the cross of a Gnadestuhl Trinity drips onto the heads of a congregation listening to a Dominican preach from the pulpit. Is it a matter of over-interpretation to assert that the artist who juxtaposed these images is proffering a theological insight of considerable depth?

These panel paintings establish Pacino’s mastery of the iconographic tradition. Returning to the Alta Trinita Beata page, we can see a similar mastery of trinitarian forms. With so many indications that deliberate iconographic thinking has gone into this composition, the question is inevitable: What does this page mean? What is the significance of gathering four alternative types of Trinity images at the corners? The image types themselves are traditional, but original with Pacino is the idea of gathering such a quantity of alternative depictions of the Trinity in one image, and relating them to each other in such a way that all the images are co-present. Pacino’s decision to split the philoxenia scene into its two moments, for instance, means that the viewer’s attention will be focused on an overt eucharistic reference as well as on the worship of the Triune God offered by Abraham. The images relativize each other, setting up a complex dialogue of mutual reinforcement and mutual correcting. This interpretive interplay among the images, however, is controlled and contained by the dominance Pacino gives to the central figure of Christ in glory, who is to be understood as the one personal God who is the Trinity.

The presence of the lyrics "high, blessed Trinity" calls into question the initial identification of the central image as the exalted Lord. Clearly the figure is Christomorphic, and it is a traditional posture of Christ to gesture benediction with one hand while holding open a book bearing the Alpha-Omega symbol with the other hand. Is this person intended to be Christ, or is it in fact the most high, blessed Trinity? There is precedent in manuscript illumination for depicting the exalted Lord and labeling that depiction "the Trinity." What is the import of this least trinitarian of all Trinity icons? The history of its iconographic development is probably to be traced to images of the ascension of Christ, although early Christian art tended to collapse the themes of ascension, Pentecost, the sending of the Apostles, and the last judgement into a single image of Christ in glory.

Despite this original Christological specificity, though, it seems that the image has undergone a growth or generalizing process, and should be read as a Christomorphic cipher for the Godhead. It is helpful to designate this figure as "the Lord," bearing in mind the way that word can stand for the Hebrew tetragrammaton as well as the Greek kyrios, thus helpfully blurring for the moment the distinction between the first and second persons, recalling that the Nicene creed applies this decisive term to the third person as well: he is "Lord and Giver of Life." The polyvalence of this complex image is probably not amenable to being reduced to a final interpretation, but by way of conclusion I offer a summary of what Pacino has achieved by combining these five (not just four) Trinity images. He has acknowledged the ineffability of the trinitarian mystery, providing a kind of visual docta ignoranta by setting a series of imperfect renderings side by side. The attention of the viewer can make its pilgrimage from one image to the next, gathering such understanding as it may and being enriched by the fullness of the iconographic witness. Ultimately, though, Pacino does not simply surrender the devout imagination to a chaotic shuffling back and forth between partial truths; he provides a focal image where the worshipful eye can come to rest on a personal presence, the face of the Lord.

Pacino’s "Summa Trinitatum" is a good example of the promise and limitations of doing theology through images. This image does not simply illustrate a concept stated verbally elsewhere, nor is it concerned to take an otherwise unattractive theological truth and decorate it with line and color. Artists like Pacino di Bonaguida are best understood as creative theological thinkers who operate in the mode of images. Their witness is part of the history of interpretation as surely as are the scripture commentaries produced by their contemporaries. Pacino shows the possibility of thinking critically from within a symbol system. He does not step outside the system, perform a non-imaginative critical maneuver, and then re-enter the system. Instead, through a disciplined and intentional use of the imagination and the iconographic tradition, he thinks critically through the symbols themselves. Pacino is a model of faith seeking visual understanding.