Basilica di Santa Maria Novella: Masaccio's Trinity
Why is it significant?
Face the green and white marble façade and run your eye along the band just below the top. You will find a carved sail, swollen with wind, repeated again and again. That is not a religious symbol. It is a family logo.
Key Facts
| Place | Basilica di Santa Maria Novella: Masaccio's Trinity |
|---|---|
| Address | Piazza di Santa Maria Novella 18, 50123 Firenze FI, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 43.77470, 11.24940 |
| Part of Walk | The Medici Quarter of Florence: Palaces, Tombs and Rivals from San Lorenzo to Santa Maria Novella |
| Generated | Generated |
Face the green and white marble façade and run your eye along the band just below the top. You will find a carved sail, swollen with wind, repeated again and again. That is not a religious symbol. It is a family logo.
The Dominican friars began this Gothic church in the late thirteenth century, and the lower part of the façade is medieval. The upper part was designed by Leon Battista Alberti and completed in 1470 for the merchant Giovanni Rucellai, whose name runs across the top in Latin capitals, with the date. The sail was his emblem, the wind of Fortune. Look also for the two astronomical instruments on the front, a quadrant and armillary spheres, added in the 1570s for Cosimo I by the Dominican astronomer Egnazio Danti.
Inside waits one of the turning points of Western art: Masaccio's Trinity, painted around 1427. With mathematically precise perspective, he opened a painted chapel in a flat wall, so convincing that it looks as if you could walk into it. Below lies a skeleton with a warning: I was once what you are, and what I am you will also be. In 1570 the fresco was hidden behind a new altar, and it was only rediscovered in the nineteenth century.
Behind the high altar, the Tornabuoni Chapel was frescoed in the late 1480s by Domenico Ghirlandaio for Giovanni Tornabuoni, manager of the Medici bank in Rome and uncle of Lorenzo the Magnificent. The sacred scenes are set in Florentine palaces, and the women of the Tornabuoni family attend the births of the Virgin and of Saint John in their finest silks. A teenage Michelangelo was apprenticed in Ghirlandaio's workshop around then.
So here is the quarter in one building: friars, a merchant's sail, a banker's chapel, a duke's instruments. Now turn left along Via della Scala, where the friars' old pharmacy still opens onto the street.