Masaccio's Trinity Fresco in Santa Maria Novella, Florence

By describing the traditional iconographic types of Trinity images and then examining how they can be mobilized by an accomplished artist, we have gained insight into the basic forms of the Christian church’s visual language. So far, however, this investigation has not addressed the complex question of the spatial and temporal modes in which these iconographic types are deployed by artists. Simply considering the iconographic types and how they can be juxtaposed is a fairly thin account of theology in the visual arts. In considering Pacino di Bonaguida, we noted the kinds of decisions he was forced to make between an older, less painterly mode and the new world dawning with the work of Giotto, a world of modeled forms, physical observation, and illusionistic depth. Depicting divine persons always poses the question of their location and their temporal relation to the human persons included in the image. In the pre-Renaissance style still available to Pacino, there were a number of conventions for marking these relations: heaven, for example, could be visually located in a delimited zone immediately above earth. A line could be drawn between them to distinguish them. God was not in the narrative area below the line; God was in this separate God-space. The divine nimbus of glory could expand into a large almond-shaped region containing God; this in itself could mark a separate space, or it could signify that what is portrayed inside of it should be understood as occurring in a visionary mode, or at a higher level of reality which was not to be mapped onto our lower reality. We have already seen that these considerations impinge on the relation of the immanent and economic Trinity, as for instance when a historical event (economy) must be depicted in the same image with an eternal reality (immanent Trinity).

With the Renaissance proper, questions of time and space and how to depict them visually become central to artistic endeavor. The new ways of representing space called for a re-thinking of traditional iconographic conventions. One of the obvious questions raised by the Renaissance visual experiment with realism is: Where do we put God? This in itself is a difficult question to which no single answer has ever proved satisfactory, but when it is considered in light of the economic-immanent distinction and the thematization of the God who occupies both time and eternity as the Trinity, the complexities multiply exponentially.

It is therefore all the more interesting that the very first painting in the Renaissance to deploy linear perspective in a consistent and systematic way has as its subject the Trinity. Masaccio’s Trinity fresco in Santa Maria Novella (see next page) belongs to the iconographic type we have been calling the Throne of Grace. As we have already seen, this type of image is especially prone to invite reflection on the economic-immanent problematic, since it includes a clear narrative element (the crucifixion of Christ) and a decided visionary element (God the Father and God the Spirit). It is not surprising that Masaccio was drawn to this particular image, and that once he took it up he would answer its challenge to grapple with the big questions of portraying the Trinity in time and space. Masaccio (1401-1428) is most famous as the young master who developed a "heroic style" of figure painting, modeling solid, rounded figures who occupied definite positions in an illusionistic space. His work also experimented playfully with the problem of how to depict the passage of time in a fixed image; see for instance his fresco in Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence of St. Peter’s shadow healing the sick. Peter strides into the foreground, and the line of people behind him appear progressively more healthy the farther back they are from his falling shadow, which has apparently moved down the line, healing as it goes.

When Masaccio was commissioned in 1425 to paint the Trinity in Santa Maria Novella in Florence, he thus brought to the task a commitment to engage the problem of portraying time and space, and by taking on the Throne of Grace he brought the economic-immanent problematic into the Renaissance visual project. Masaccio’s Trinity has survived into our time, but is in very bad repair. It is true fresco, painted directly onto the wet plastered wall. It was covered by new decorations in 1570, and actually moved altogether in 1861 to another wall of the church. In 1952 it was returned to its original location, where it remains. Its colors have faded to faint shades, and most published photographs of it have been manipulated to provide greater contrast and enhance its visibility. Even in its dilapidated state, it is a striking presence in the church. Masaccio painted a large doorway of two tones of marble, complete with an arch supported by doric columns. Through this doorway he depicted an illusionistic chapel space which seems to extend some distance back under a vaulted ceiling to another arched doorway. This architectural space is constructed using a Brunelleschian linear perspective system which immediately engages viewers and seems to involve them in the imagined chapel. Outside the doorway kneel two donors; they are to be read as occupying our space. Just inside the doorway and up one marble step are Mary and John the Evangelist, life size, standing at the foot of a cross which towers over their heads. On the cross is the dead Christ (he already bears the side wound which proves his death), and behind him is God the Father, holding the horizontal beam of the cross. Between their heads is the dove of the Holy Spirit, descending. Some of the modeled shadows of the dove have faded especially badly, reducing the bird to mostly white negative space which is often confused with the Father’s garment (the dove falls at about the place a collar might, under the Father’s chin).

Masaccio has created a fictive space which we can read as continuous with our own. Our physical space gives way gradually to the space of the chapel: we are here, the donors are with us on this side of the doorway, Mary and John just inside the door, and beyond them the cross. As Rona Goffen comments, "Farthest back, God the Father stands with the crucified Christ somewhere between him and the other two sacred figures. Their precise location cannot be determined, and this spatial imprecision seems purposeful, a way of suggesting the ineffability of the most sacred figures..." In ancient art, whether Egyptian or Byzantine, a standard way of showing relative importance is through relative size. Hierarchical stature sets the kings and gods apart from the mortals; the former are simply bigger. Goffen notes that Masaccio has transposed hierarchical stature into the Renaissance framework: "Depth and height --but not scale-- express the hierarchy of being here, and ‘here’ seems to be a chapel opening from the nave of Santa Maria Novella." God is further up and further in, higher and more deeply embedded in the perspectival space. The Trinity fresco is a kind of Renaissance meditation on the space of God and the complex way it impinges on our own. Masaccio carries out this meditation by making the illusionistic chapel the most important character in the painting: "For the first time in Western art, fictive architecture becomes a protagonist."

The economic-immanent distinction is clearly in play in this image, but it may be more enlightening to discuss it in terms of narrative and devotional modes of representation. There are clear narrative elements in the fresco: a crucifixion with Mary and John at the foot of the cross depicts an event which took place in history in some particular space. To paint a crucifixion is to illustrate a story, and Masaccio’s version of the crucifixion story is based on countless iconographic predecessors. Devotional images, on the other hand, are abstracted from time. The chief instance of a devotional image is a painting of the face of Christ, although it is possible to render historical events devotionally rather than narratively (as for instance the small medieval statues which consist entirely of the beloved disciple leaning his head on the breast of Jesus: an event from the passion narrative, but abstracted from its setting for devotional consideration). The Throne of Grace iconographic type exhibits a devotional-narrative tension by its very nature, but in Masaccio’s hands the tension is heightened by being placed in the fresco’s virtual space. Goffen calls the collision of time and eternity in this image, "invoking both the historical event of the Crucifixion and its underlying significance, which is beyond history, namely, Christ's redemptive sacrifice ...a kind of temporal sfumatura, or blurring, as it were."