Expert: Maria - 10/11/2006

Question
Why would an artist like Masaccio be attracted to a rational system like perspective to depict his Trinity?


Answer
Hello,

First of all this question does not refer to ANCIENT/CLASSICAL HISTORY which  ends in 476 AD
(5th.century AD) with the fall of the Western Roman Empire, while Masaccio (i.e. Tommaso Cassai), one of the  great painters of the Italian Renaissance, whose innovations in the use of scientific perspective inaugurated the modern era in painting, was born  in San Giovanni Valdarno, close to Florence, in 1401 and died in  Rome at the very young age of 27 in 1428, and then lived of course in the 15th century, i.e. 10 centuries later.

Second, this question has to do obviously  with the HISTORY of ART which is not my field of expertise.
So, you should look for an expert in that area.

Anyway, the only thing I can say is that in the fresco "La Trinità"(The Trinity with the Virgin, St. John and Two Donors) which is  in the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence (Firenze), Masaccio ‘ingeniously created a pictorial perspective which coincides with the eye of the observer so that we have the illusion of a space that does not in fact exist but which our eye, deceived, perceives as real’.

Masaccio  who probably completed this fresco at the age of 27, in the year when (as far as we know) he died, was attracted to Brunelleschian perspective as he admired Filippo Brunelleschi, great Florentine architect (see the dome of the Florence Cathedral ) and sculptor who was a pioneer in perspective.
In his treatise on painting in fact Leon Battista Alberti describes how Brunelleschi, although he was not a painter, devised 'a method for representing objects in depth on a flat surface by means of using a single vanishing point'.

Moreover it seems that Brunelleschi (Florence 1377 – 1446) gave some suggestions to Masaccio on how to use the perspective in The Trinity, when Masaccio was just working on this fresco in 1427-28.

This in short, of course.
Anyway ask an expert in art history and specifically in the Italian Renaissance Art.

Good luck!
Maria