English
By all accounts, the Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem was built in the exact spot where the cross on which Jesus of Nazareth was crucified stood. According to tradition this is where Adam was buried. There is a fresco in Florence whose iconography shows the unusual combination of a Trinity, with which all of its death and decay, could well be a transposition of the sacred shrine. In it, God the Father solemnly oversees the martyrdom of his son from behind the cross, at the foot of which, flanking it, are Mary, whose eyes seem lost in the empty space, and Saint John. The three, Christ, Mary and Saint John, form a triangle whose base is widened by the figures beneath, the principals who commissioned the painting. A skeleton lying on a sarcophagus, inscribed with the memento mori ” I once was what you are and what I am you also will be” occupies the bottom of the fresco.
This is the fresco of the Trinity, and was painted around 1425-28 by Masaccio, who died prematurely, poisoned before the age of 30 years. It occupies a space in one of the side walls of the church of Santa Maria Novella, famous above all for the unique polychrome marble facade by Leon Battista Alberti. Santa Maria Novella seems to offer a perfect example of the principles outlined by Alberti´s treatise on architecture exhibiting harmonic drive, and forming a whole in which all parties bear a relationship to each other as is the best music, so balanced that any alteration of any of the aspects would ruin the whole.
The façade is so beautiful that many casual visitors, dazzled by the architecture, pass right by the church and miss entering to see the Trinity of Masaccio. In doing so they miss out on seeing one of the most revolutionary paintings of art history, one of the first paintings to follow the mathematical laws of perspective by discovered by Brunelleschi in 1424 and published by Alberti, in 1436.
This radical painting, to use the words of Bill Viola, accelerated the development of techniques used for creating artificial images.
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Paul Oilzum
If you rent apartments in Florence you can see this work and be overpowered by its vertigo and and impressive realism. Just visit the the Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella, in Florence.
