TEMPORALITY IN MASACCIO'S TRINITY (1426): The Rhetoric of its Architectural Setting

Abstract

In 1952, the Italian art historian Ugo Procacci found behind an altar in the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence a fresco of a skeleton. The fresco was the lower thirdofapaintingdescribedby Vasari in his Lives of the Painters. The upper part of the painting, showing the Trinity above Mary, St John and of two kneeling donors, had been moved to the entrance wall of the church three centuries earlier (1570). It was a painting famous in its own time, a masterpiece of Masaccio's painted around 1425-7. This paper argues that Masaccio's Trinity straddles medieval and renaissance symbolic structures, one rooted in symbolic geometry, and the other based in narratives indebted to Christian rhetoric. It reinterprets ancient themes of temporality and a-temporality in its use of an architectural setting. The paper considers the relation to illusion and to perspective in architectural representation, and to the symbolic nature of representation. It sets the problem of temporal representation in the light of the work of Adrian Snodgrass in temporality in architecture, including his writings on mandalas. The useof'symbolandits interpretation is placed in the context of participation and ritual, that suggest an inevitable surrender of the self in an order established by an architectural setting.