What Is Masaccio Holy Trinity

Masaccio's "Holy Trinity" is one of the most intellectually and deeply moving pictures ever painted. Located in the Florentine church of Santa Maria Novella, it is remarkable for its early naturalism which initiated the Renaissance painting style, but also for the way it incorporates the material world with deep metaphysical significance. The "Holy Trinity" is both the most rational and mysterious of images in that it creates the convincing illusion of space within a painting. Tommaso di Giovanni, called Masaccio, was born in San Giovanni Valdarno on the day of St. John Thomas, for whom he was named. Giovanni Cassai, his father, dies when Massaccio was five years old. His mother remarried and his stepsister's husband, Mariotto di Christofano,
The "Holy Trinity" is noteworthy for its inspiration taken from the ancient Roman arches and the recently developed technique by using a vanishing point at the viewer's eye level. With the way the vault was drawn and divided into squares with rosettas that dimish and are foreshortened, it appears as if a room has been cut into the wall and Jesus and God in right in front of the viewer. This technique is called trompe l'oeil which means "deceives the eye" in French. The title of the painting comes from the three key figures; Christ on the cross, God the Father standing on a ledge behind Christ, and the Holy Spirit which is symbolozied by a white dove. Masaccio put everything on common level. The painted figures are roughly life-size. For an average person, their eye-line view would have been above ground level with Death in the form of the crypt and skeleton directly in front and the promise it Salvation above. The figure behind Jesus on the cross represents God. Prior to the Renissance it was unheard of to actually paint God. What expressed humansim was the face he painted God with the resemblence to a man. Not only did he
What we see looks like a Roman triumphal arch with a correred ceiling, barrel vault, pilaster and columns. This type of construction indicates the type of interest that Masaccio had in antique buildings in the Roman empire. One of the most signifcant aspects of this fresco is the way he made the use of one-point linear perspective to convey the sense that the images receded back in space. The coffers on the ceiling create the lines and the vanishing point at the base of the cross. This creates the sence that the space is actually a continuation of the chapel space in which the fresco is painted. He also paid close attention to the dimensions of the objects and spaces that he painted so much you could actually determine the dimensions of the room you were looking at in the fresco. Masaccio included much of what we see from ancient Roman architecture such as the indented squares that decorated the ceiling which are known as collers, attached columns, a shallow, flattend out columns known as pilasters, a barrel vault, scrolls shapes at the top of the columns known as iconic and vertical, indented lined or grooves that decorated the pilasters and known as fluting. The life-size figures were painted with a new kind of sculptural modeling which made them seem to occupy real space as sculptures would. The architectural setting is contructed with a one-point perspective. This creates a convincing