Masaccio died young at 26 in 1428. Based on an internet search I could not find any writings by Masaccio about his methods or sketches for his paintings, so everything we know about his creative process is derived from inductive analysis based on his works and those of his contemporaries. While Vasari (Lives of the Most Eminent Painters) and Alberti (Della Pittura 1435)

·       The Dominican Friars of the Church

·       All who entered Santa through the Main Entrance. According to the Santa Maria Novella guidebook (Aldo Tarquini o.p. “Santa Maria Novella”) the current building (the “New” Santa Maria”) replaced a prior building because the “Old” building was too small to hold the enormous crowds.

·       Mourners entering from the graveyard.

·       Evidenced by the inclusion in commentaries by Vasari and Alberti, The Holy Trinity attracted famous artists to study and learn from Masaccio’s style.  

·       As citizens of Florence would have felt a direct connection to The Holy Trinity. They would recognize the donors depicted on the side, and relate to St. John the Baptist, the patron saint of Florence.

·       That the appearance of the Holy Trinity is in a vault that appears to be a new addition to Santa Maria Novella, with only a slight reference to Cavalry Hill with the mound of dirt at the base of the cross, says that the Holy Trinity was not only for those who were witnesses in Jesus time. The viewers can experience The Holy Trinity right in front of them at their local church for all time.

·       As citizens of Florence they would have felt a direct connection to The Holy Trinity. They would recognize the donors depicted on the side, and relate to St. John the Baptist, the patron saint of Florence.

·       Fellow artists would contemplate and examine the painting in detail, likely following the incisions and copying the work for their own edification.

·       This painting speaks to the deeply held Roman Catholic faith of the people of Florence and of the Papal countries, particularly the need to be assured of salvation in the afterlife, which this work offers, particularly in its positioning in Santa Maria Novella for maximal viewing.

·       The presence of local donors also speaks to the importance of contributing to the church, whether by tithing, buying indulgences, or sponsoring religious artworks for all to view. Also, these are not anonymous donors but widely viewed and known, which shows the importance of visible commitment.

• Took place in Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Burkhardt pg.84)

o Masaccio’s short life from 1401 to 1428 was entirely in Italy, grew up in Florence and died in Rome. So he definitely fits into the time period and location typifying the Renaissance.

• Revival of Antiquity (Burkhardt pg.104)

o The vault in The Trinity represents Greek and Roman architecture

 The interior is held up with Ionic columns.

 Flanking the vault are Corinthian columns with fluting.

 The pillars hold up the rounded Roman arch with the barrel vault having the arched roof with square coffers reminiscent of the Arch of Septimius Severus from atop Capitoline Hill, 203 AD, Rome.

o The robes worn are contemporary with the Roman style at the time of the crucifixion.

• Realism -Domestic, Deceptive and Expressive (Burke pp.23-27) and Naturalism (Burke pg.153)

o Deceptive Realism is the rendering of an image so that it appears to be from life. This is where Masaccio is truly groundbreaking with The Trinity.

 The use of single point perspective means that every element of the painting would appear in the right proportions to a viewer standing at a single point (calculated at 218.9 cm or about 7 feet in front of the painting), eye level to an average height. At that point it would appear that there is a whole in the wall and the viewer is actually seeing Jesus on the cross suspended in front of them.

 The anatomy of Jesus delineates every muscle and rib.

 The light and shadows on the bodies, folds of the clothes and architecture is consistently coming from a source facing up to the altar.

 The tomb at the bottom appears to project out from the wall.

 Each character has a unique expression, Mary gesturing to her son with a look of judgement, St. John hands folding looking at his cousin in sorrow and the worshipers with palms together gazing at the scene in faith, God gazing down with an unblinking stare into the souls of the viewers, even Jesus with a look of having been released from pain and ready to awaken (James).

o Expressive Realism which reflects changes from a perfect depiction that add meaning to vibrancy to the subject. Ralph Lieberman argues that Masaccio goes beyond merely “making the fictive pictorial space convincing” with “geometric construct”, but employs the “two elements” that are impossible to construct geometrically: a sense of light and air.”

 While God’s feet (drawn with perfect foreshortening) are planted on a ledge at the back of the vault, his holding of the cross appears to be projecting to the front of the vault.

 Masaccio uses a mix of colors for the flesh of the people and the elements of the architecture which further gives depth and lifelike skin tones.

 The clothing is balanced alternating red and blue. To unify the elements of the painting.

o Domestic Realism is the use of non-liturgical elements with which the viewer can relate.

 The two worshippers at either side are assumed to be the donors who would be known to viewers of the painting.

 The tomb at the bottom would be representative of the tombs in the church and graveyard of Santa Maria Novella.

 The message inscribed above the sarcophagus is in Italian vs. the Latin that would be officially used in the Church. That is a message not about the subject of the Trinity, but a moral thought for the viewer.

• Individualism (Burke pg. 28) (Burkhardt pg.104)

o This was not a work of art to be displayed high up in the church for the masses, but rather to be individually experienced by each viewer.

o Each of the characters is unique in features, position and emotion making them fully formed individuals.

o Even the golden halos are uniquely colored and drawn with perspective and angled to move with the heads of the characters vs the uniform two-dimensional solid gold-colored halos in Medieval paintings.

• Cross-fertilization of disciplines (Burke pp. 29-30) There are no original writings by Masaccio or contemporaries on his how he created his work or his influences, but much has been inferred by the elements of his paintings, the guidelines etched in the plaster, and the contemporary artists, architects and other craftspeople who would have available and likely worked with Masaccio such as Brunelleschi.

o Use of mathematics to calculate precise layout, size (with foreshortening) of each person and object in order to provide uncanny three-dimensional phenomenon for the viewer.

 Brunelleschi likely helped Masaccio with developing his perspective drawings as well as the architecture representations. Brunelleschi not only had designed architectural marvels such as the Duomo but had developed perspectives rendition of three-dimensional objects on mathematical two-dimensional drawings using a vanishing point and radiating lines. This was done before The Trinity, although the evidence of it is from Leon Battista Alberti’s detailed description of the mathematics and geometry of perspective in De Pictura written in 1435 and published in 1450, 26 years after The Trinity.

 It was argued by Dr. Jane Andrews Aiken that the layout of the painting made heavy use of the mathematics behind the design of the Astrolabe for the tracking of heavenly bodies as they traversed the sky. While astrolabes may seem archaic and completed today, it was understood and widely used in the Masaccio’s time for navigation and time keeping. Using the math of converting bodies in a hemispheric space to two dimensions gives precise measurements of all the objects in The Holy Trinity, except where Masaccio likely deliberately deviated (such as the positioning of God with feet at the back and hands at the front).

o In Della Pittura, written after Masaccio's death, Alberti states "It would please me more to have you copy a mediocre sculpture than an excellent painting. Nothing more can be acquired form paintings but the knowledge of how to imitate them: from sculpture you learn to imitate it and how to recognize and draw he lights" (quoted by Lieberman, pp. 145-147). Masaccio evidences this study of sculpture, particularly in the delineation of light and shadow (chiaroscuro) as the representation of Jesus appears to draw directly from Brunelleschi's Crucifix, 1410-1415 and Giotto's Crucifix, 1288-89. The painting is similar to both sculptures in Santa Maria Novella in terms of positioning, skin coloring and Jesus’ visage.

o The study of Anatomy, again also seen in the other sculptures, articulation of muscles, skeleton and the realistic positioning of limbs.

• Religious art no longer just the province of the Catholic Church by sponsored by merchants, guilds, elected bodies and other economic and civic entities. We can see two worshipers on either side of the presentation who do not represent saints but are generally agreed to be the sponsors of The Holy Trinity. Like a precursor to today’s product placement in movies, they would be recognized by their contemporaries as both pious and supports of the local church.

·       Masaccio’s The Tribute Money (1425, Brancacci Chapel, Florence) is an example of a painting that with more contemporary references. It is about Jesus discussing the payment of taxes to earthly kings, Peter being instructed to find money in a fish’s mouth, and the payment of money to Caesar’s tax collector. The scene is set outdoors in the Arno Valley with Pratomango mountain range in the background. The variety among the group of men in ages, stature, expression, clothing and body types represents ordinary Florentine “men on the street”. The painting was commissioned at the time when Florence was relying on a tax system, the Catasto, to pay off debts incurred in the war with Visconti of Milan. So, the painting basically had Jesus endorsement of paying taxes. (Hartt, pp. 158-160)

o  Haskins posits that innovations were more on a continuum rather than a sharp break from the past. There had been discoveries and learning throughout the “Dark Ages” with a high point in the twelfth century over a hundred years before the supposed return to ancient learnings in the late thirteenth century.

§   While it is true that various aspects used by Masaccio in The Holy Trinity had been used before, i.e. perspective, light and dark to shape figures, anatomy, expression and so forth, his “Renaissance perspective was the first extended analysis of what we would now call virtual reality” (Lieberman). It was the unified vision of the full composition of all of these elements that make The Holy Trinity a revolutionary break from the past. An analogy would be that Steve Jobs did not invent the technologies used by the Apple interfaces, rather they had already been developed at Xerox. But it was in how he combined and improved on them to make a personal computer centered on the end user that was revolutionary (Newsweek). After Masaccio painting was forever changed as seen in the work of his students Fra Lippi and Fra Angelico (Hartt pp. 169-185) and in the works of Michaelangelo, Da Vinci and Van Eyck (personal observation)

o  Green adds that many of the innovations of the Renaissance have been declared in hindsight today and were not recognized contemporaneously. Alberti, writing soon after Masaccio’s passing and Vasari, who wrote about 125 years after Masaccio, certainly recognized the breakthroughs of Masaccio long before the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

§  Alberti lays out the detailed mathematics of single point perspective and names Masaccio among a list of artists with “a genius for every laudable enterprise in no way inferior to any of the ancients who gained fame in these arts.” I then realized that the ability to achieve the highest distinction in any meritorious activity lies in our own industry and diligence no less than in the favours of Nature and of the times. I admit that for the ancients, who had many precedents to learn from and to imitate, it was less difficult to master those noble arts which for us today prove arduous; but it follows that our fame should be all the greater if without preceptors and without any model to imitate we discover arts and sciences hitherto unheard of and unseen.”

§  Vasari speaks directly to the innovation of Masaccio “Wherefore, in truth, we owe a great obligation to those early craftsmen who showed to us, by means of their labours, the true way to climb to the greatest height; and with regard to the good manner of painting, we are indebted above all to Masaccio, seeing that he, as one desirous of acquiring fame, perceived that painting is nothing but the counterfeiting of all the things of nature, vividly and simply, with drawing and with colours, even as she produced them for us, and that he who attains to this most perfectly can be called excellent. This truth, I say, being recognized by Masaccio, brought it about that by means of continuous study he learnt so much that he can be numbered among the first who cleared away, in a great measure, the hardness, the imperfections, and the difficulties of the art, and that he gave a beginning to beautiful attitudes, movements, liveliness, and vivacity, and to a certain relief truly characteristic and natural; which no painter up to his time had ever done. And since he had excellent judgment, he reflected that all the figures that did not stand firmly with their feet in foreshortening on the level, but stood on tip-toe, were lacking in all goodness of manner in the essential points, and that those who make them thus show that they do not understand foreshortening. And although Paolo Uccello had tried his hand at this, and had done something, solving this difficulty to some extent, yet Masaccio, introducing many new methods, made foreshortenings from every point of view much better than any other who had lived up to that time. And he painted his works with good unity and softness, harmonizing the flesh-colours of the heads and of the nudes with the colours of the draperies, which he delighted to make with few folds and simple, as they are in life and nature. This has been of great use to craftsmen, and he deserves therefore to be commended as if he had been its inventor, for in truth the works made before his day can be said to be painted, while his are living, real, and natural, in comparison with those made by the others.” (Vasari, pg 183-184)

Green points out that most of the world were subsistence peasants who had no knowledge or the means to participate in the rarified world of the Renaissance artists, poets, architects, philosophers enjoyed by the religious, political and economic elite. But one might argue that They were exposed to the innovations in the Renaissance art in their attendance at Church and in the way they worshiped, as churches were the gathering place for the general public (Class discussion). An analogy could be the dialogue in the Devil Wears Prada when Miranda Priestly, the imperious editor-in-chief of a fictional fashion magazine takes newly hired Andy Sachs to task when Andy is dismissive of high fashion (The Devil Wears Prada Cerulean Sweater Monologue) and Miranda points out that the decisions of the elite few do impact the general public:

§  Andy Sachs: No. No, no, nothing’s… you know, it’s just that… both those belts look exactly the same to me. Y’know, I’m still learning about this stuff, and uh… (giggles uncomfortably)

§  Miranda Priestly: This… “stuff”? Oh, okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You… go to your closet, and you select… I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back, but what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean. You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that, in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns, and then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent, wasn’t it?… who showed cerulean military jackets. I think we need a jacket here. And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars of countless jobs, and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room… from a pile of “stuff.”