The Perspective Construction of Masaccios Trinity Fresco and Medieval Astronomical Graphics Essay Example For Students

The Perspective Construction of Masaccios Trinity Fresco and Medieval Astronomical Graphics Essay Quite beyond the solemn reality brought to bear on the central mystery of the Christian faith, Masaccios Holy Trinity fresco has played a pivotal role in the history of art as both a definitive example of earty Renaissance linear perspective and as a kind of prophetic forerunner of the perspective method discussed neartye decade later by Leon 8attista Alberti1 While Albertis Della Pitture of 1435 may be the first written docu ment to articulate a new humanist ideal of pamting in which visual appearances are controlled by geometric principles em bedded in nature, Masaccios fresco of the Trinity is the first extant painting fully informed by that ideal.2 The magnificent vault arching over the austere figures in Masaccios fresco of the mid-1420s   is an utterly convincing illusion of archi tectural form oxtendmg into space, and for centuries it has boon justly celebrated on that account. Yet it is not an historical ex emplar devoid of uncertainties. It has been difficult, for Instance, to determine exactly where the figures of the Virgin and St. John stand with respect to the projected ground plane, and ascertaining the position of God the Fathers feet has proved a particularly mystifying problem. So far as the perspective con struction itself is concerned, there is little agreement among scholars about either the vertical position of the projected cen tnc point on the wall or the distance of the viewer from the painting1 These are important issues for ad historians to resolve, and much time has been spent in considering them within the con text of the Renaissance awakening. Yet having succumbed to the fascinating pursuit of Albertian consistencies, are we really any closer to understanding the method and conceptual frame work of Masaccios perspective scheme except in the limiting terms proposed by AJberti? Was Masaccio simply unable to master the difficultdisotto m su projection that would have suc cessfully foreshortened the awe inspiring figures in the fore ground of his fresco? Is it because the fresco has been moved several times that we are unable to decode Masaccios perspec tive projection? Or the stringently rational context of Albertis Delia Pttura really appropriate for understanding a painting cre ated in Ftorenco during the 1420s, when one might still expect to find a fluid dialogue between reason and faith in an image of the Corpus Dommi executed for the conservative Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella? Certainly Joseph fblzers detailed photographs of the points and lines embedded in the fresh plaster provide strong evidence that the illusionistic impact of the vault depended on many drf ferent artiste techniques. It needs now to be said that this di versity of techniques Includes orthographic, conical, and stereo graphic methods made familiar to late Medieval painters through instructive working drawings of architects and instrument mak ers as much as through practical geometry texts that had gov erned the artists early education.* If the very complexity of the Trinity fresco vault projection has long encouraged art histori ans to conjecture Filippo Brunelles chis involvement in its plan ning, the diversity of the projection techniques discovered there would seem all the more to confirm the architects participation in the complex project. Perhaps more importantly, as Poker has shown, that diversity of means is competingly unified both pictorially and theoretically at the level of mathematics and mea surement. The imaginatrve sweep of Masaccios accomplish ment is not to be found solely in the precise ordering of lines and planes, however, for ho (or more likefy Brunelleschi) dis carded earlier and more tentative experiments in favor of a ra tionally consistent method of structuring his own arching sepul chral vault which drew on and mirrored the mathematically defined coordinates of the vault of the heavens. It is the aim of the following essay to show that the one pre existing graphic tradition of great authority for projecting these mathematically regulated and symbolically charged spatial co ordinates was the tradition of medieval astronomical diagrams. This tradition was not only useful in practical detail, but it was also intrinsically suggestive to early perspectives, and prob ably determinative with respect to t he special viewing circum stances presented by the Trinity. Not only did this graphic tradi tion take into account the position of tho viewer looking intcntty upward; its most familiar projections were ordered according to the exemplary symmetries of a divinely created cosmos. The orthographic and stereographic protections of medieval astrono mers and the common ground they shared with mathematical diagrams provided a readily availaNe source to Masaccio and Brunelleschi of a full range of necessary diagramming techniques at the same time that they affirmed the mathematical order be lieved to control all of nature. Case Study Of High Strength Concrete Construction EssayThe rhetorical intent of Masaccios geometry is further suggested by the location of the incised centric point denoting the height of the â€Å"viewer. at al most 3 breccia above the church floor, a measure which carries with it the same connotations of the ideal as the circles and squares ol the surface geometry.M While Alberti would main tain that this was the height of the average viewer, giving it a seemingly practical sanction, it fits neatly into the Vitruvian scheme of ideal human proportions In addition, it is a com- monly known symbolic height in late medieval guide books to Jerusalem, where 3 breccia is proclaimed to be the height of the perfect man. Christ.Despite the fact that the location of the centric point coincides with e reasonable viewing height, its place ment confirms Masaccios attention to non-physical and non visual considerations associated with the time honored symbolic power of numbers as well as the p urity of mathematical relation ships and analogues. That one should find such doubly potent symbols of perfection in an image of the Tnnity in Santa Maria Novella is   keeping with the central role played by the Corpus Domim in the sacerdotal life of this conservative Dominican Church.’ M Masaccios fresco was adventurous, even radical, in its aggressive imitation of a powerful, physically present nature, the inteiectuel context of his grid and projection systems, as well as the newly rationalized aesthetic on which they depended, remained firmly linked to a traditional and highly suggestive re ligious interpretation of natural order in which mathematics func tions as a bridge between concrete, sensible reality and univer sal or divine truth.17 Quite beyond shape end measure conveying meaning in an obvious and frankly didactic way. the points, lines, and pianos which make sense to many as surface geometry, medieval math ematicians would have understood within the broader context of a mathematical graphics tradition intent on e xplaining another kind of absolute perfection, the continually changing relation ships among the coordinate systems of a vast and earth-cen tered universe as those systems were projected onto a plane surface. These projections were a part of an unbroken tradition of mathematical diagramming techniques dating back at least to the 4th century B.C. The many different diagrams bound by this tradition were found in widely circulated copies of ancient texts by Euclid. Archimedes, and Ptolemy, medieval commentaries by Messahala. Jordanus de Nemore. and Campanus of Novara, as well es in the practical geometry tracts that formed the foun dation of an artists education in the Florentineabbaco schools.The precision with which some of the still visible construction   lines wore scratched into the wet surface of the Trinity offers some proof that Masaccio (or more likely Brunelleschi) was not only familiar with this graphic tradition but even painstakingly followed its rules Not merely the result of convenience, the compositional grid of the Trinity is ihe product of a highly conflated application of different lines of mathematical reasoning to a spatial problem whose main features derive directly from the astronomical con ventions of the day. First of ail. Masaccios apparent use of a centric point to designate the projection of a ray (in this case, the principal line of sightl onto the plane of projection, together with the right angle relationship of ray to plane were not only defined by Alberti in 1435 but were typical aspects of medieval astro nomical projections.50 Also, certain lines, generally regarded as mero surface marks by art historians, would have been inter preted by mathematicians and anyone familiar with the astrolabe . the most popular astronomical siting device of the  late Middle Ages, as projections of planes perpendicular to the plane of representation.