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MASACCIO'S "TRINITY" WINS THE PRIZEAuthor(s): James BeckSource: Source: Notes in the History of Art, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Fall 2002), pp. 14-24Published by: Ars Brevis Foundation, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23206818 .
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MASACCIO'S TRINITY WINS THE PRIZE
James Beck
Masaccio's Trinity in Florence s Santa
Maria Novella is the most prestigious paint ing of the ealy Renaissance in Italy. In it, we find a combination of features that are justi fiably considered "modern." A formidable demonstration of the new perspective to
gether with figures formulated with monu
mentality and gravitational reality appear for the first time in painting, all this played out within a convincing atmospheric world. The spatial complexity of the Trinity contin ues to confound and amaze the experts even
today. Besides, in the Trinity, we find for the first time specified portraits of donors ren dered in a natural scale. For these reasons,
Masaccio's Trinity is represented as a key object in the handbooks of art history. I con sider the painting, which reveals twenty seven giornate, or days of work, as dating from the end of 1425 (others opt for 1427). Of course, many more days were required for the preparation and the refinements, but we can still assume that it was executed by Masaccio in a couple of months.
The restoration of the Trinity, completed in 2001, constitutes, in my opinion, an act of cultural violence and cultural arrogance. Most interventions, even those that, in the final analysis, are poorly resolved, have been motivated—at least partially—by cer tain conservational necessities. The results of the Brancacci Chapel restoration com
pleted in 1988 are truly hateful, having pro duced an homogenization of the three
(perhaps more?) hands active there. Now
Masaccio looks like Masohno, who looks like Filippino Lippi, the last separated from the first by more than fifty years. Neverthe
less, behind the intervention were genuine and serious conservational problems. I have no intention of excusing the drastic and irreversible restoration of the Brancacci
Chapel, which included overcleaning and
ample repainting, but at least the problems of humidity and water in the walls were confronted. What went wrong was that the conservational demands were conflated with those of aesthetics.
In contrast to the Brancacci frescoes, the
Trinity had already been restored in relative
ly recent times (the early 1960s) by a distin
guished restorer of his day, the late Leonetto
Tintori, resulting in acceptable reconstruc tion/restoration. The historical conditions were significantly different from that of the Brancacci Chapel, which had its own vicis
situdes, including a nasty fire in the church in the eighteenth century that damaged the
chapel and ruined frescoes by Masolino in the vault and the lunettes. The Trinity was hidden from view in the mid-sixteenth cen
tury, only to be rediscovered in the nine
teenth, when it was transferred onto canvas and taken from its original position in the left aisle and placed on the inner facade of the church. Once physically removed from the wall, it was no longer subject to damag ing salts, which are major enemies of fres co. The painting was moved again, in the twentieth century, to its present location:
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back on the wall of the left aisle. All of these actions caused irrevocable losses.
Given this background, the decision to intervene yet again on the detached fresco
was to take a path replete with dangers for the work. The built-in risks were made known publicly less than a decade ago by ArtWatch International, which also urged the Florentine Magistratura to be on alert for a planned intervention, already an nounced at that time by the then-sponsor, the Olivetti Corporation. Our claim then, as
now, has been that no convincing need to intervene had been established and that the
goals of the restoration were not clearly stated. Our warning to the court appeared to
dampen the enthusiasm of the art officials at least for a few years, but their determination to move ahead was percolating. Word leaked out in 1999 that the Opificio della Pietre Dure was poised to "restore" Masaccio to its original glory (as the rhetoric always has
it). I raised my voice this time in the Italian
press, mainly in the form of an interview in La Stampa of Turin, warning of the inevit able risks; but the Opificio proceeded as
planned—if indeed, "planned" is the appro priate word, for there seems to have been
very little planning in either the approach or the methodology. The Trinity now is yet fur ther testimony of ill-conceived actions
imposed upon world-class masterpieces un dertaken especially in the past two decades.
In this essay, it would be unproductive to retrace the sad history of the fresco that, unlike the Brancacci frescoes, is entirely Masaccio's (Fig. 1). If the Trinity was by no means a totally genuine object before and after Tintori's restoration of the early 1960s, it had presented itself over these past forty years with honor, having managed to retain much of Masaccio's inherent dignity and
monumentality. Alas, it has taken contem
porary restorers from one of the most pres tigious institutes of its kind, the Opificio, to deliver the coup de grace. In a pseudo learned CD, amid the usual chatter about
its refound glory, the sombre yet majestic Trinity has become a thin, pale fresco that has been given an improbable, difficult-to
explain pinkish hue. Today it can dubbed La Trinite en Rose.
Why has the work turned out the way it has? It is poor direction on the part of the
supervisors? Or poor chemical and physical reports on the part of the staff scientists? Or
poor workmanship on the part of the several
[s/c] teams who carried out the actual restoration? Perhaps the truth lies in all of these factors. But, you might ask, was an international committee called together to examine the situation before work began? After all, Masaccio is one of the most wide
ly studied and beloved artists of the Italian Renaissance. German, English, French, and American scholars in particular have been devoted to studying his art for a century. Yet the sad truth is that no consensus was
sought and none given, nor was a confer ence or international meeting of specialists and interested parties called to discuss the need and the desirability for such a restora tion. Nor, for that matter, has there been a
post facto "open" conference to evaluate the results. Low profile seems to have been the
ruling principle in this case.
Simply speaking, the decision to inter vene was made, for all practical purposes, unilaterally. And perhaps worse still, one seeks in vain for a carefully articulated proj ect and a public statement that would have
explained the need for such a drastic (the
adjective used by an official of the Opificio with regard to the Trinity) intervention. There was no listing of the objectives of the restoration—of what the restorers hoped to
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Fig. 1 Masaccio, Trinity (detail), before restoration. Santa Maria
Novella, Florence
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achieve—a practice that should be regarded as sine qua non before scalpels and solvents are applied to any painted surface. Further
more, a document describing the methodol
ogy should have been part of a public dossier. The Opificio, presumably with the
permission of the appropriate Florentine officials and perhaps with the permission of the ministry in Rome, decided to do this restoration. Apparently, the occasion arose when the Gothic church, with Alberti's mar velous facade, was closed during a refur
bishing for the Jubilee of 2000. I take this opportunity to comment upon
the situation surrounding the restoration that was presented to me on a very hot August morning in 2000, thanks to the openness of the director of the Opificio and her staff. Thus I am better able to understand the
general conditions with regard not only to this restoration, but to fresco restorations in
general. The first thing I observed was the struc
ture and configuration of the scaffolding. The horizontal levels had been constructed to facilitate the restoration activity, but they were arbitrary in their rapport with the
painting itself, its composition, and the location of the figures. The result? Arbitrary zones that had little to do with the painting's structure and probably with the original pontate, or levels, employed by Masaccio. The divergence should not come as a sur
prise, however, because this situation is the
norm, which points to one of the more dan
gerous aspects of modern restoration. For one thing, when the scaffolding is fixed, no
complete view of a work is ever possible during restoration. Since not even complete figures are visible, their organic unity can not be appreciated by the restorers. Further
more, the relationship between one figure
and another is obliterated. Every art student
is well aware that any changes in one part of a picture alters the whole, and any change in
part of a figure affects the entire figure. I
contend, therefore, that the very structure of the scaffolding imposes upon the restoration almost insurmountable difficulties. The restorers can obtain the complete view of a work only after the removal of the scaffold
ing—that is, after the main work has been done.
An analogous aberration can be singled out as it impacts on the order in which the work proceeds in a fresco restoration like this one (and in the Sistine Chapel ceiling), as well as in restoration work on paintings with canvas and wood supports. Generally, the restoration proceeds in orderly rectangu lar sections that are arbitrary with regard to the pictorial imagery; the work moves along section by section (as is well documented in the case of the Sistine Chapel ceiling) with out any correlation to the order followed by the painter. This mechanical and artificial
approach is used mainly for the comfort of the restorers but does not even remotely reflect the sequence followed by the
original artist, whether Michelangelo or Masaccio.
In light of these conditions, the laments
by critics of recent restoration for the loss of a sense of a work's unity as well as that work's lack of harmony are credible. I believe that it is practically impossible for
restorers, even those with great ability and devotion to their craft, to solve these prob lems when working under such constraints. As an example, while workers were restor
ing the torso of Christ of the Trinity, the head was not visible.
And the same negative conditions are
present during both principle phases of the
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intervention: (1) the cleaning and (2) the
repairs, repainting, and other adjustments to the pictorial surface.
Parenthetically, professional restorers do not like and no longer use words such as
repainting, preferring such euphemisms as
integration. In response, I suggest that if
you use brushes and apply paint to a sur
face, regardless of whether the paint is watercolor or casein or whether it is laid down in little lines or dots, that act can prop erly be called painting. And if it replaces some other painting that was present in the
past, it can and should be called repainting. With regard to the scaffolding construc
tion described above, work space is also
highly restricted, a condition that not only assumes and forces the operators to work close to the pictorial surface, but fails to offer them the possibility of distant view
ing—as was the case in the Sistine Chapel restoration. True enough, Michelangelo did not have that advantage either, but, then, the
Opificio restorers cannot claim to be
Michelangelos. Most of the work, both the
cleaning and the repainting, is, in fact, done
very close to the surface, with a heavy dependence upon magnification. The al most inevitable result is to lose the forest for the trees.
The question of lighting the work site
during restoration constitutes yet another condition that brings about distortions.
Symptomatically, during my visit to the
Trinity restoration, I was offered a powerful lamp, similar to the ones used by the opera tors, in order to scrutinize Masaccio's sur face. To the chagrin of the restorers, I refused the lamp, observing that since Masaccio did not have such an instrument when he painted, I would do without it, too. I suspect that for restorers, this dependence on using strong electric lights for cleaning
has created aberrations in the final results, as can be seen in the Sistine Chapel and in the recently overcleaned Stanze of Raphael in the Vatican Palace.
Indeed, the general practice of using en hanced lenses—as had been employed with fanfare by the restorers of Leonardo's Last
Supper—with strong lights leads to the glo rification of the tiny fragments and slivers of color. And using the lenses and lights with other equipment has resulted in the for mation of the supposition that the restora tion is "scientific" and that if one works
slowly in this manner, by the end of the
project all problems will have been auto
matically—and miraculously—solved. Returning to the Trinity, in my judgment
it would have been far better to have left it the way it was, except for a systematic dust
ing and the re-adhesion of bits of color where they were loose—activities that fall into the category of general maintenance.
Instead, Tintori's retouches, which were executed in watercolor, were quickly removed. But the restorations and repaint ing of Bianchi from a century before, which had been laid in using more permanent tech
niques, were retained. The choice to keep one set of restorations, with all of its
epochal presumptions, and destroy another
represents an ambiguous, if not intolerable,
assumption based upon convenience. Yet a further determining factor involved
in the restoration of Masaccio's masterpiece has been the application of barium hydrox ide, a chemical consolidant usually referred to as "bario." It is not within my compe tence to evaluate the validity of this choice, so highly favored by the Opificio, but I can call attention to the fact that this technique has a long history in Florence, where its
application was "invented." It is not, howev
er, used by the Istituto Centrale di Restauro
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in Rome, whose experts discourage its ap plication altogether. When the only two national institutes of restoration in Italy are in disagreement over basic techniques of
restoration, what can the rest of us think about the state of the activity? At least for now, I advocate reliance upon more tradi tional approaches and materials—and a pox on both your houses.
A similar objection can be made when
considering the chemical compound AB57, which was triumphantly praised as the sol vent for the cleaning of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. It has long since been out of favor, being regarded as too strong, and was never recommended by the Opificio delle Pietre Dure. Such disagreements as well as the
application of relatively untested chemicals for restorations of important artworks sug gest that we are still in the infancy of the scientific aspect of this activity.
Since the completion of the restoration, the lighting in the Trinity has become virtu
ally impossible to decipher, and the model
ing of the figures seems idiosyncratic. The pockmarked male donor (Domenico Lenzi?) seems to have suffered from a nasty case of psoriasis or roseola. Perhaps the modern restorers are superior in their ability to Tintori; perhaps not. The point is that no solid, convincing explanation for having launched into the activity in the first place has been offered.
Usually, in order to evaluate a restoration, as the popular press as well as technical
publications have done, the state of the work before and after the intervention is
compared by means of photographs. Even on this elemental level, however, problems occur since a great deal depends upon the
quality of the photographs, particularly those from "before" since that "text" no
longer exists except in memory: the original
is gone. Besides, in similar cases the incli nation is to show the "before" illustrations as being especially dark and ugly in order to demonstrate how much better the "after"
looks. Even the "after" views themselves are highly selective—for the sake of favor able comparisons. More recently, with ad vanced computer technology, photographs can be manipulated to make one's point. Bearing in mind the built-in shortcomings of comparisons based upon photographs, let us proceed.
In the "before" state, which in fact repre sents Tintori's and Bianchi's restorations, we notice many fissures over the surface of the entire fresco, not to mention ample reconstructions, some of which have be come dark. These disfigurements, which were only disconcertingly visible from close up, seem to have been a principal motivation for the intervention, which has to be regarded as an aesthetic rather than a conservational one. I suppose the claim is that the work is now more "authentic." One should keep in mind, especially since the advent of Impressionism but not foreign to Titian's technique, that the eye tends to understand the forms and easily passes over such disturbances. (To be frank, they never bother me.)
The middle-aged man on the left, surely the donor, is shown in profile (Fig. 2a and 2b, before and after restoration, respective ly). The inclination of his nose is parallel to his forehead and was applied over part of the pilaster, which Masaccio had painted in first. (This prompts an art-historical aside: it
points to the likelihood that Masaccio worked out the architecture of his scene first, presumably in collaboration with Brunelleschi, and then added the figures.) The subject has a small eye, aquiline nose, fine mouth, and strong chin under which
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Fig. 2a Masaccio, donor (detail of Fig. 1), before restoration
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Fig. 2b Masaccio, donor (detail of Fig. 1), after restoration
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there is a pronounced shadow. The ear remains squeezed by a type of headgear typ ical of a magistrate. The light falls on the nose and accents the flesh of the nostril, while illuminating rather uniformly the rest of the face. Looking at the pilaster behind
him, we see a low gray tone that is in har
mony with the face. The reader is invited to make the comparisons between the prere stored and restored versions.
Tiny adjustments can been seen every where, but let us concentrate on the head of Christ (Fig. 3a and 3b, before and after
restoration, respectively). In cases such as
this, it is often imperative to consult the
image or a detail of the state of the image
during the cleaning process, when one can still see what is left of the original, since modern restorers normally remove all the old restorations along with the dirt and so forth. (Other factors are relevant here, too, because sometimes not all the old retouches are removed, due to either convenience or
difficulty.) Let us compare the head and torso of Christ in the three states—
prerestoration, mid-restoration, and post restoration—recognizing that the middle state occurs after the cleaning as well as after certain stucco repairs.
In postrestoration, the state we have now
and will have for decades, the entire head, the arms, and the torso are now brighter but
Fig. 3a Masaccio, Christ (detail of Fig. 1), before restoration (state 1)
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also flatter. In terms of chiaroscuro, the fig ure has lost a sense of volume and corpore ality, defining characteristics of Masaccio's art.
Light also functions in locating the figure within the composition. After the cleaning phase, the Opificio restorers had a particu larly difficult time with the juncture be tween the head and the body. We see in state 2 that they had already filled in missing areas with stucco. In state 3, which is after the restoration and repainting, we observe that the whole area has become darker and is characterized by a type of thick black line that functions visually to cut off the head from the body. Tintori, as seen in state 1,
had instead given the area an ambiguous but
acceptable tonality so that the head and
body belonged to each other. The box decorations in the vault (caset
toni) immediately above Christ's right arm,
arguably designed by Brunelleschi, have been nearly lost altogether in the cleaning and now constitute a flayed zone that makes little pictorial sense. The fact is that one could study the entire fresco bit by bit, sec tion by section, zone by zone and find simi lar losses and alterations.
The best that one can hope for now is that this mistreated work becomes a lesson, even if a culturally costly one. Wouldn't it have been better to have created an international
Fig. 3b Masaccio, Christ (detail of Fig. 1), after restoration (state 3)
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commission to verify in the first place the need for such a drastic intervention? The
pluses and minuses should have been
weighed by disinterested parties, not by the
operators and institutes that were to carry out the work. And even when problems of conservation were isolated, the solution need not have been a drastic cleaning. Rather, the conservational problems should have been approached.
The common assumption also held by the restorers of the Trinity is that modern oper ators are better than their predecessors when it comes to cleaning, repainting, and reinte
grating. Perhaps this confidence is based
upon on the illusion of modern "scientific"
backup. The difference between the old and new restorers is that in the past restorers were trained painters who later turned to
restoration, while today they are trained from the start to be "restorers," many lack
ing the instincts of the painter. I always find it heartening to realize that
scientists never say that their results are 100
percent certain and perfect. In medicine, a doctor or a surgeon would never say with absolute certainty that a patient will recover. He or she would give percentages—80 per cent or 90 percent and so on. Even with a
simple diagnosis, there is always a margin of error. But when it comes to restoration
work, there never seem to be dangers, never
possibilities for negatives: everything is
always perfect. In reality, such is rarely the case. With Masaccio's Trinity, the greatest error was to undertake the intervention in the first place. From then on, it was down hill all the way.
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