Lilith and the draconcopes. Maiden-headed tempters from the Talmud to Boccaccio

One of the masterpieces of Florentine Renaissance painting, the fresco cycle 1424-1428) in the Brancacci Chapel of the Carmine Church, begins with the scene of the Fall from Paradise. While the cycle was made truly great by Masaccio’s contribution, the leading master here was Masolino, and he also painted the opening picture. In it, we see the first couple in a light, dancing, Gothic posture under the tree from which the tempting snake hovers over them. But this snake has a strangely human head: a charming female face with a hunge blonde crown of hair.

Who is this woman?

The well-informed would immediately reply: Lilith, Adam’s ex, who has been known to the educated European since Goethe’s Witch Saturday (1808):

“MEPHISTO: Adams erste Frau! Nimm dich in Acht von ihren schönen Haaren, Vor diesem Schmuck, mit dem sie einzig prangt, Wenn sie damit den jungen Mann erlangt, So läßt sich ihn so bald nicht wieder fahren.”

“MEPHISTOPHELES: Adam’s first wife is she. Beware the lure within her lovely tresses, The splendid sole adornment of her hair! When he succeeds therewith a youth to snare, Not soon again she frees him from her jesses.”

This picture is also taken from Goethe by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the founder of the Pre-Raphaelite school, in his sonnet entitled Body’s Beauty, published in 1881, which, however, originally accompanied his picture Lady Lilith (1866-1873) with the title Lilith:

„Lo! as that youth’s eyes burned at thine, so went Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent And round his heart one strangling golden hair.”

The other impressive Pre-Raphaelite portrait of Lilith by John Collier, 1892, Merseyside, Atkinson Art Gallery

However, we know that the devil is the father of lies, and thus the marriage certificate shown to Dr. Faust that mentions Lilith is also a big fake.

In fact, Lilith appears in one single place in the Hebrew Bible, in Isaiah 34 (13-16), where the Lord foretells how He would destroy Edom:

“Thorns will overrun her citadels, nettles and brambles her strongholds. She will become a haunt for jackals, a home for owls. Desert creatures will meet with hyenas, and wild goats will bleat to each other. There the lilith לִילִית will also lie down and find for themselves places of rest. The owl will nest there and lay eggs, she will hatch them and care for her young under the shadow of her wings. There also the falcons will gather, each with its mate.”

The role of the lilith is here to mark, along with all the other ominous beings, how desolate the Lord makes Edom. But as to exactly what kind of being it is, we are not told, since the name is a hapax legomenon, a word that only occurs once in the Bible. Nevertheless, it must have been familiar to the Jews of the period if it could be used to indicate the extent of destruction. As if we were reading today that a place has become a home for vampires and orcs, the nest of Dracula. The products of the fantasy literature of the last hundred years are pretty much in the public consciousness, they don’t need to be explained.

The words lili and līlītu in the Mesopotamian languages Sumerian, Akkadian and Assyrian, meant ʻspirit’, in some texts a disease-bearing spirit living in the wind. It was probably from there and in this sense transferred into the Aramaic language spoken by the Jews of Babylon and the Bible. In the 4th to 6th century AD, “bowls of incantation” were widespread in the area: these were hidden in the base or ground of the houses as traps to catch the liliths intruding in the houses. These bowls were used by all local cultures and languages. Several hundred of them have been found from Jews with texts in Aramaic. biblical or talmudic references.

A Jewish bowl of incantation from the 6th century (above) and its contemporary counterpart collected by Penn Museum (below)

Typically, Bible translations did not know what to do with the name. The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Diaspora Jews merges the hyenas with the lilith under the name “onocentaur”, and translates the goat, understood as a satyre, as “demon”.

“καὶ συναντήσουσιν δαιμόνια ὀνοκενταύροις καὶ βοήσουσιν ἕτερος πρὸς τὸν ἕτερον ἐκεῗ ἀναπαύσονται ὀνοκένταυροι εὗρον γὰρ αὑτοῗς ἀνάπαυσιν”

“and demons will meet onocentaurs, and they will cry to each other; there will rest the onocentaurs, finding a resting place there.”

Basically, this translation is followed by the Vulgate, the Latin translation of St. Jerome, which translates the lilith as lamia, a child-devoring female demon in Greek mythology:

“et occurrent daemonia onocentauris et pilosus clamabit alter ad alterum, ibi cubavit lamia et invenit sibi requiem”

“and demons will meet onocentaurs, and hairy beings cry to each other. The lamia also abides there, it finds a resting place there.”

The meaning of ʻonocentaur’ was only slightly clearer than that of the lilith. Based on ὄνος = donkey, it was interpreted as a kind of donkey-centaur. This is how a 12th-century Franco-Flemish bestiary depicts the encounter of the demon with the onocentaur:


In Jewish rabbinic literature, the name only occurs four times, always referring to the text of Isaiah, in a sense of “evil spirit” until the 8-10th c. AD, that is, well into the Middle Ages, when a Hebrew treatise called The Alphabet of Ben Sira made it a person. The treatise contains twice 22 proverbs in Aramaic and Hebrew, arranged according to the Hebrew alphabet, and illuminates the meaning of each with a Midrashic story. According to the story that interests us here, Ben Sira heals the sick little son of King Nebuchadnezzar with an amulet. When the king asks him what he wrote on the amulet, Ben Sira tells him that God kneaded the first human couple from the dust of earth, and they were thus equal. The woman, Lilith, therefore, did not want to lie under Adam in the bed, as required by Jewish sexual morals, but she wanted to be above. She rebelled and fled to the Red Sea, where she mated with demons. God sent three angels after her, Senoy, Sansenoy and Semangelof, who, however, failed to bring her back. All they could agree with her was that although she as a demon now had power to infect newborn children, nevertheless if the names of these three angels were written somewhere, she would not hurt the child there.

Literature considers this tractate a kind of satire, a compilation of parodies brought together by bored yeshivabohers, a huge hoax full of pedantic talmudic hochmetsing over assorted smut, from farting through masturbation to incest (for example, Ben Sira himself is said to be born from the union of Prophet Jeremiah with his own daughter). This is how seriously we have to take the tradition of Lilith as Adam’s first wife. True, in the double creation story of the Book of Genesis, God first creates the man and the woman in His own image (Gen 1:27), and then He creates the woman from the rib of the man (Gen 2:22). For believers in the literal interpretation of the Bible, these were two creations: but then, where is the first woman? This logical hiatus was made up for by the yeshivabohers with the lilith which stood without any real meaning in the Bible and the Talmud. Before them, however, neither the Jewish nor the Christian exegetical tradition raised and answered this question, especially not by creating a “first wife”.

In any case, the amulet recommended against child death sounded too good to be left behind. Better safe than sorry, the amulet began to become a reality in Jewish circles, and was widely used until the 20th century.

A medieval amulet, with the names of the three angels in the three bird-like figures, from the Amsterdam 1701 edition of Sepher Raziel HaMalach (Archangel Raziel’s Secret Book) (above), a 18th-century printed kimpetbrivl (kind+bet+briv, child-bed-letter) from the Jewish Museum in Berlin (below), and a 19th-century silver amulet with the figure of Lilith from the collection of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem (more below)

And along with the amulet, the idea of Lilith as Adam’s first wife gradually took root in Jewish folk religiosity. However, this idea excited Christians even more, when they first became acquainted with this Jewish tradition which they considered a very ancient and holy secret knowledge. This happened just in Florence at the end of the 15th century, when in Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Platonic Academy, of which Pico della Mirandola, the first Christian kabbalist, was a member, they started translating excerpts from the Kabbalah and rabbinic literature. This is how the motif appeared in works of artists who were visitors of the Academy. Filippino Lippi, for example, painted in the Filippo Strozzi Chapel of Santa Maria Novella the first four patriarchs, including Adam as he protects his little son Seth from Lilith (while he still casts a dreamy look at his ex of rich red hair). Some art historians also see Lilith in Michelangelo’s temptress in the Sistine Chapel, or in Bosch’s first woman in the Garden of Earthly Delights, but their arguments are not convincing: these works can be perfectly explained from the medieval Christian tradition, which we will see below.




The Neoplatonic trend, however, died out in the 16th century. Lilith was resurrected by Goethe, and elevated to new heights and made a “Victorian icon” by the Pre-Raphaelites, so much that she is now considered a feminist patron saint as the first woman who did not renounce her equality with man.

It is interesting to see how modern Bible translations change with the spread of the Lilith myth, and how Lilith, created by the yeshivabohers, Goethe and the Pre-Raphaelites, moves into the barren homestead of the lilith as a harmful spirit of Is 34:14. Luther still translates lilith as Kobold, the later versions as Gespenster, ʻspirits’, while the Geneva Schlechter of 2000 as Lilith. The earliest English versions as lamia, borrowed from the Vulgate, the King James Version as screech owl, while the later English versions represented it more and more as lilith, and even Lilith. The first – Protestant – Hungarian version has éji boszorkány (night witch), while the new Catholic version has Lilith. The myth seems to have done a good job, and soon you will be able to prove from the Bible itself that Lilith was a central figure of ancient Jewish faith, at least since the time of Isaiah.

The very first printed amulet against Lilith. Amsterdam, c. 1700. “Adam and Eve, excluding Lilith. Senoy, Sansenoy and Semangelof guardian angels, break the Satan.”

The image of the maiden-headed serpent tempting Adam and Eve in paradise, however, had been born much before the Jewish esoteric tradition was translated in the Medici court: in fact, not long after the yeshivabohers’ arsing-about gave birth to Lilith as Adam’s first wife. Its author, Petrus Comestor was the head of the 12th-century Parisian theological school, who in 1173 published his Historia scholastica, the “popular Bible” of the Middle Ages, which became a basic handbook of the university curriculum and was translated into most European vernaculars. He wrote:

“Because Lucifer was afraid of being found out by the man, he approached the woman, who had less foresight and was [like] «wax to be twisted into vice» and this by means of the serpent; for the serpent at that time was erect like a man, since it was laid prostrate when it was cursed. … He also chose a certain kind of serpent … which had the countenance of a virgin, because like favors like; and he moved its tongue to speak, though it knew nothing itself, just as he speaks through the frenzied and the possessed.”

A maiden-headed snake standing on two feet in Hugo van der Goes’ The fall of man (after 1479), in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum

An erect snake. Furtmeyr Bible, Regensburg, after 1475

Speculum humanae salvationis, German, 14th c. British Library, Harley 4996 f. 4v

Johanna of Castilia’s prayer book. British Library, Add. MS 18852, fol. 15v

Book of Hours, Bruges or Ghent, 15th c. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, MS 287, fol. 46r

And here you have that “certain kind of serpent” chosen by Lucifer: the draconcopes (=ʻsnake-footed’). From the Hortus Sanitatis,1491. Originally from Vincent of Beauvais’ 13th-century Speculum naturale: “Draconcopedes serpentes magni sunt, et potentes, facies virgineas habentes humanis similes, in draconum corpus desinentes.” (Dracontopedes are large and strong snakes, whose maiden-face is similar to the man, but their body ends in snake body.)

The image was adopted by many authors. One of its most popular distributors was the 12th-century Norman-English mystery play Le Jeu d’Adam, which, in three acts, presented creation, the Fall and the prophecies about the coming of the Savior (here you can see its modern presentation). The piece, played across Europe, was mostly performed in front of the main gates of the cathedrals, and at a certain point displayed a “cleverly contrived” snake on a tree. It was certainly maiden-headed, because its figure also passed on to the carvings of the portals made at that time.

Paris, Notre-Dame, western façade, 13th c.

Another important mediator of the image was Boccaccio’s On Famous Women (De mulieribus claris), also translated into many languages. The series of famous women began with Eve, whose story, in the 14th- and 15th-century manuscripts, was illustrated with the Fall, invariably with a maiden-headed snake. The most moving example is the manuscript at the Getty Museum illustrated by the Boucicaut Master between 1413 and 1415, in the opening picture of which Boccaccio, sitting at his desk at the left side wall of the Paradise, is waiting for old Adam and Eve arriving from the right, to record oral history with them.

Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, Limbourg brothers, between 1411 and 1415, fol. 25v

Boccaccio, The Fall of Princes, translated by John Lydgate, 1450-60. British Library, Harley 1766, fol. 11r

It was only a step away from the work of an Italian author to an Italian painter to paint the motif as well. In the early 1420s, Paolo Uccello was commissioned to paint the cycle of Creation and Fall in the so-called Green Cloister of Santa Maria Novella in Florence. The pictures – which were severely damaged by the 1966 flood of Arno – were still fresh when Masaccio worked here on the fresco of the Trinity, and in parallel on the fresco cycle of the Brancacci Chapel, where a similar woman-headed tempter would soon appear.




We have seen the actors; let the cycle begin.

That wall seems to be pierced. Masaccio's Trinity

Masaccio: Portrait of a young boy (perhaps a self-portrait of Masaccio who died at the age of only 26), 1420s

“In rock’n’roll, those cut down in their prime are lucky to be remembered for the art they created. Masaccio, on the other hand, is remembered for creating art itself.”

“Masaccio, the old master who died young”, The Guardian, 7.7.2008

The great Hungarian literary historian Antal Szerb writes that the image of the great classics fixed in public opinion is mostly true, as it has passed through a thousand filters, but it gradually becomes an empty scheme. “When you talk about it, you don’t really mean anything. In such cases, it is necessary to revise this image, and if it proves to be correct, to fill the scheme with new life, to make it true again.”

This is what I would like to do now with Masaccio, whom we hold in high esteem as one of the founding fathers of Renaissance art, but most of us would not be able to tell why.

I have long wanted to survey, in a series of lectures, the European Renaissances, the markedly different visual worlds the new style created in different regions from the Netherlands to the distinct Italian schools in the 14th and 15th century, before merging in a single homogeneous “post-Raphaelite” style from the mid-1500s. This is what I start now, thanks to our weekly virtual trips, by analyzing the picture that, as we shall see, was a kind of manifesto and zero point of Renaissance painting, and which radically changed the direction of European painting. This picture is Masaccio’s fresco of the Trinity painted between 1426 and 1428 in the Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence.


In the architectural frame of the fresco we see Got the Father holding the cross of the crucified Christ with both hands, while the dove of the Holy Spirit is hovering between the heads of the two of them. At the foot of the cross, as on the Crucifixion images, stand Mary and St. John the Evangelist. Mary looks outward, toward the spectator, and points to the cross, while John is completely immersed in the contemplation of the dead Christ. In front of them, and outside the virtual architecture, a donator couple is kneeling. They are not looking at the extraordinary spectacle unfolding beside them, within the arch, but rather inward, as if this vision appeared on the screen of their brains during prayer or meditation. The arch as a boundary also indicates that the donators and the figures of the crucifixion scene are in two different layers of reality. Nevertheless, Mary turns directly to us from the reality removed from us by two layers, inviting us to the crucified Christ, the same vision the donators see in their imagination. We’ll get back to that.

The fresco is in a privileged place in the church: in the nave, the place of the laity, right next to the pulpit, which is a particularly important site of the church of the Dominicans – the Ordo Praedicatorum. This image provides the closest visual background and illustrative material for the preacher, to which we will also get back. To its significance, we must therefore briefly look at what the Dominicans and their monastery meant to 15th-century Florence.



The Dominicans arrived in Florence in 1221, where – like all the late-established mendicant orders, including the Franciscans and Augustinians – they were given bulding plots outside the city walls. The building of the church and the monastery began in 1246 and lasted for almost a century. It was useful that the complex was built as a greenfield investment, as this was the only way to expand it into a kind of a city-in-the-city with its multi-chapeled basilica, cemetery, no less than six cloisters, academy of theology and a number of wings. From the early 15th century, it was also the city’s official “luxury hotel” where the city’s representative guests – popes, kings, emperors – stayed with their entourage, and here was organized between 1431 and 1449, with the participation of the prelates of many never-before-seen Eastern countries, the Council of Florence to end the rupture between the Western and Eastern churches.



The monks played an equally important role in the religious and spiritual life of the city. The Dominican church was the social center of large merchant families, which commissioned the magnificent fresco cycles, marble façade and all other decorations of the church with the most famous artists of the age, and the Dominican fathers were their spiritual leaders.

The Strozzi Chapel, whose frescoes of the Last Judgment were painted between 1350 and 1357 by Nardo di Cione on the basis of Dante’s Commedia

The main altar of the Strozzi Chapel was made by the brother of the frescoes’ master, Andrea di Cione, better known as Orcagna. In the period, it was customary for masters executing public paintings in the church nave to pick up important motifs from the upscale sanctuary chapels. Masaccio borrowed from here the face of God the Father and the posture of the two donators kneeling beside the niche in his Trinity.

The central Tornabuoni Chapel. In Masaccio’s time, this was also adorned with paintings by Nardo di Cione, but between 1485 and 1490 the family commissioned here one of the most important fresco cycles of the Quattrocento with Ghirlandaio, which, as we shall see, also refers back to Masaccio.

Tornabuoni Chapel. Ghirlandaio: The apparition of the angel to Zechariah the priest. To the right are portraited some members of the Tornabuoni family, and in the lower left corner the prominent humanist members of Lorenzo il Magnifico’s Accademia Platonica, Marsilio Ficino, Cristoforo Landino, Agnolo Poliziano and Demetrio Calcondila

The Gondi Chapel, with the crucifix of Filippo Brunelleschi, 1410-15. This was the first truly Renaissance crucifix with the anatomically accurately, muscularly, nakedly depicted Christ. Masaccio borrowed this corpus to his Trinity.

Giotto’s large crucifix now hangs in the middle of the nave, but in Masaccio’s time it was in the sanctuary. The similar head of Christ in the Trinity can also refer to this with.

The sermons of the Dominican church attracted the entire city. In that age, preaching was a public show, it played the role of today’s theaters, concerts and cinemas. People remembered and appreciated good preachers, whose speeches were great mass events. In 1400, for example, after the sermon of theological professor Giovanni Dominici, notary Lapo Mazzei wrote a letter to Francesco Datini, the richest merchant of the age, in Prato, explaining in detail that he had never heard anyone so effectively moving the audience: “we all cried or stood shocked before the obvious truth he pointed out”, and tries to persuade Datini to come and hear it for himself: “it will be as if you heard a disciple of St. Francis, and you will be born again”.

The pulpit of the Dominican church, designed by Filippo Brunelleschi, 1443

Apotheosis of the Dominican order. A fresco by Andrea da Bonaiuto in the chapter hall of the convent, 1365, about which I will later write in detail. In the picture we see the Duomo of Florence with a dome that Filippo Brunelleschi will be able to complete with great difficulty seventy years after the fresco. Around it, the Dominicans are teaching, preaching, protecting the lambs of Christ from the heretic wolves, and leading them to heaven. The symbols of the Dominicans – Dominicani – wearing black and white dresses are the equally black and white Domini Canes, the Dogs of the Lord, who are performing the same at their feet.

Visual means – images displayed, adjancent altarpieces referred to, etc. – were common elements of sermons in the period. So it was with Masaccio’s fresco, which had many intricate theological layers of meaning, obviously for the purpose of illustration. This program was given to the artist by a Dominican theologian collaborating with the commissioner. The artist could not decide it for himself: in this age, he was still the same craftsman as a carpenter or bricklayer who carved and walled what he was ordered.

What was this program?

Such a public image in such an important place had to address a wide range of social layers at once, from the most sophisticated theologians to the common people, and therefore its program also conveyed a wide variety of messages. Let’s look at the most important ones.

The most unusual element for us, God the Father holding the cross of the dead Christ, had two theological meanings in the age, which are connected through the sacrifice of Christ. This motif first appeared in mass books and altars in the 12th century, and symbolized the most important part of the Mass, the sacrifice. During this, the priest transforms the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, thus repeating the redemptive work that Christ fulfilled through crucifixion. According to the conception of the church, this sacrifice, which takes place in time here on earth, and therefore must be repeated over and over again, is connected with the heavenly sacrifice of Christ, which takes place continuously in the heavens, where time does not exist. Thus the first paragraph of the most sacred text of the Mass, the canon, asks God to accept the sacrifice presented on earth and make it part of the heavenly Mass:

“We therefore humbly pray and beseech Thee, most merciful Father, that Thou wouldst accept and bless these gifts, so they become the body and blood of thy Son our Lord Jesus Christ, by whose order we celebrate these holy secrets. … In humble prayer we ask Thou, almight God, command that these gifts be borne by the hands of Thy holy angel to Thy altar on high in the sight of Thy divine majesty, so that all of us, who through this participation at the altar receive the most holy body and blood of your Son, may be filled with every grace and heavenly blessing.”

In the visual formula we see that God the Father already lifted this sacrifice in the image of the crucified Christ, and holds it up there as the sacrifice of the heavenly Mass. Since the Latin text of the canon (“Te igitur…”) begins with the letter T, this was often painted in the manuscripts as the cross of Christ, sometimes held by the Father.

Heinrich Quentell’s Mass book of Cologne (1500) in the Franciscan library in Gyöngyös

A miniature from the Cambrai Mass Book, c. 1120

Portable alter of Hildesheim, c. 1160-1170

The altar of the Jesuit church in Eger, 1772. It is especially dear to me, because I wrote my M.A. dissertation about it some thirty years ago. The Jesuit General St. Francis of Borgia is kneeling at the altar and is just reciting the canon “Te igitur”, while an angel at the top of the altar is already carrying the sacrifice symbolized with the cross to the heavenly altar.

Another meaning of this visual formula emphasizes the redemptive power of the sacrifice of the cross. At such times, the person praying turns to the Father, and asks for His assistance with reference to the redeeming power of Christ. As Jean de Fécamp, the most popular 10th-century meditation author writes it: “Father, I place the sacrifice of Christ among you and my sins.” This is exactly how the miniature of Duke Berry’s Book of Hours (1412-1416) represents it:


This representation spread mainly in prayer books, breviaries and meditation images. The figure of Christ, who saved us by dying on the cross, is pictured as an encouragement, a proof of salvation. Since these images served the purpose of prayer and meditation, that is, the communication with God, therefore the Father looks openly at us, and often the person praying / meditating is also kneeling on the image, as if to invite us to imitate him. All these motifs are clearly present in Masaccio’s picture.

This very common pictorial formula is called “Throne of Mercy” (or, in German, Gnadenstuhl) in art history, based on St. Paul’s verse: “Let us then approach the Throne of Mercy with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.” (Heb 4:16). The “Throne of Mercy” here does not mean the throne of God the Father, but the cross, the throne of Christ who died on it and thereby brought us the grace of salvation.

Silesian meditation icon, before 1345. Museum of Wrocław

A home altar with the Virgin Mary and St. John the Evangelist. Westphalia, after 1250. Berlin, Gemäldegalerie

A home altar from the Netherlands, with angels carrying the means of suffering around the Trinity, c. 1390. Berlin, Gemäldegalerie

Throne of Mercy, Salzburg, c. 1470. Berlin, Gemäldegalerie

The formula of the Throne of Mercy was even adopted in Russian icons. This was recently studied by the Hungarian art historian Ágnes Kriza in the prestigious Journal of Warburg and Courtauld Institutes.

A side branch of the formula: the “openable Madonnas” were fashionable mainly in France and Germany in the Middle Ages. Opening the regular statue of the Madonna with the Child, we see a representation of the Throne of Grace. This did not mean as if Mary had given birth to the full Trinity. The formula is used here as a pictorial abbreviation for “grace”: Mary as the mother of salvation, that is, Christ.

Decoding these complex theological meanings required a high level of theological education or meditation practice, or the preacher to tell them to the faithful gathered before the fresco. But the image also had a message for those who approached it without such education, and/or outside of preaching.

Beneath the donators stands a painted stone sarcophagus with a skeleton laying on it. The quote over the skeleton, in Italian – that is, deliberately in the common vernacular instead of Latin – says: “I was who you are, and who I am will you be.”

Fra Angelico: The mourning of Christ, 1435. The laying dead also had to remind the viewers of this pictorial topos.

This memento mori refers to an extremely popular legend of the period, “the encounter of the three living and the three dead”. In this narrative, widespread across Europe, three young men set out to hunt and meet three dead in the woods. When asked in shock who they are, they respond with the above sentence. The young men are shaken by this encounter and follow their lives along a more pious path.

De Lisle Psaltery, c. 1310 (MS Arundel 83 II, fol. 127r)

Prayer book of Bonne of Luxembourg, Duchess of Normandy. Attributed to Jean LeNoir. Before 1349

Thaymouth Hours (MS Yates Thompson 12), fol 179v and 180r. Marginal drawings on two pages of a Latin manuscript, with an Anglo-Saxon poem:

[above:] Ich am aghast. Lo whet ich se. Me þinkeþ hit beþ develes þre. [below:] Ich was wel fair. Such shal tou be. For godes loue be war be me.

The most famous Italian example in the Camposanto of Pisa

Masaccio’s fresco was placed on the wall of the nave so that it best revealed itself when someone entered the church from the adjacent cemetery, through the side door. So if one visited his or her decased loved ones in the cemetery and the entered the church with the pain felt over their death, this painted altar immediately served as a consolation. Contemplating it from the bottom up, he or she first identified his/her dead with the skeleton and then him/herself with the donators, while the top scene announced that through Christ’s salvation, both the dead and he/she will receive grace and they will see each other in heaven.

The church with the cemetery and the side door to the right. Today this is the standard entrance for tourists.

Jacopo da Sellaio’s altarpiece after Masaccio. He converted the “memento mori” skeleton into two real dead, mourned by the donator as his wife and daughter, while his little son is consoled by St. John the Evangelist. Florence is in the background.

Finally, the image also had a very popular layer of meaning, which was actually its model. In medieval and early modern Florence, street tabernacles – small-depth booths in which a public sacred image was placed – were extremely popular. There were hundreds of them, most of which have survived to this day. The paintings placed in them depicted an intercessory saint – mainly the Virgin Mary –, to whom the passers-by could say a quick prayer, and in this way they were the means of sanctifying everyday life. These images also had many other casual roles: for example, a major market sale was often finalized before such tabernacles. This casualty was their main characteristic: that they helped each to communicate with the intercessory saint and through him/her with God in his or her own way, freely, without ritual precepts and priestly mediation.

Painted glass window of Orsanmichele: The Madonna rescuing the thief from the gallows who prayed before her tabernacle (1380-1400) (above), and the people praying before the tabernacle of the Orsanmichele Madonna in a Vatican manuscript (below)

The public character of these images meant that they competed for the attention of passers-by, and therefore followed very similar visual rules as modern posters: they had to be quickly readable, easy to understand, and convincing / commanding authority. This was supported by the small number of figures composed in a compact group, and new visual means, such as some of the saints looking out of the picture and stopping and inviting the passers-by with a pointing gesture, not unlike 20th-century recruiting posters. This tool, that the painter should employ an outward-looking character who creates a visual bridge between the viewer and the plot, was first recommended by Leon Battista Alberti in his treatise On painting (De pictura, 1435, but published only in 1450). However, this book only harvested the best of the visual solutions of the previous generations, and as we see, public painting had developed and used the inviting gesture already a century earlier.

Giottino (Tommaso di Stefano), Madonna della Sagra, 1356, today in the Accademia (above), and in its original place, in a tabernacle on the corner of Piazza di Santo Spirito (below)

So Masaccio actually brought such a street tabernacle into the church space, painting the Trinity and its veneration in its frame structure. This also meant that even the simplest people immediately understood the basic message of the picture: they saw a mediator, the Savior Christ himself, to whom they could pray in their own way, and while Mary invited them to do just that, St. John and the donators were already showing the viewer’s job. The image, like the street tabernacles, is quickly readable, easy to understand, and convincing / commanding authority.

By what visual means does the painter achieve this? With the solid, sculptural figures and tight architectural frame.

Like any other master, the painter works from “brought material”, he selects and further develops his visual solutions from what he has seen. What did Masaccio see, what could he choose in contemporary Florence from?

Artists in the Florence of the period followed basically two trends. Either they used to a greater or lesser extent Giotto’s visual solutions, or they imitated the works of the international Gothic of French-Flemish origin.

Giotto: Burial of Mary, c. 1310. Berlin, Gemäldegalerie

Giotto: Burial of Mary, detail. An angel blowing the coal of an incense burner. Berlin, Gemäldegalerie

Giotto: Lamentation of Christ, Padova, Scrovegni Chapel, c. 1305

We remember from school that Renaissance painting began with Giotto, who first painted by nature. However, this is a retrospective historical construction of Giorgio Vasari who wrote the history of Italian renaissance in 1568. Reality, as usual, is more complicated. Giotto did not paint by nature, but he rather carried over into painting the classicizing, solid sculptures of his older contemporary, the Florentine chief architect Arnolfo di Cambio. In doing so, he broke with the stylized figures of his predecessors, Cimabue and Duccio, based on Byzantine icons, which was undoubtedly a great novelty and naturalness for contemporaries. On the other hand, he also tried to show the depth of space in his paintings, which he achieved by the solid figures lined up behind each other, or with the rocks and architectural details set as stage props. During the 14th century, his followers applied these two highly regarded novelties to varying degrees. It was not, therefore, as Vasari suggests, that he created a method, followed and improved by the next generations, but he only created some visual solutions that his followers could incorporate into their fundamentally medieval pictures. In Florence, such were Maso di Banco, who painted the life of Pope St. Silvester in the Bardi Chapel of Santa Croce (1335), Agnolo Gaddi, who painted the legend of the Holy Cross in the main chapel of the same church (1385-87), or Spinello Aretino, who depicted the life of St. Benedict in San Miniato al Monte (1388). These imposing cycles undoubtedly had a great influence on Masaccio, who formed his grave, solid figures on the base of these paintings.




However, it was not this Giottesque trend that was most fashionable in Masaccio’s time, in early 15th-century Florence, but rather the international Gothic of Franco-Flemish origin. This style worked with gracefully curved, almost disembodied figures, to whom only the rich folds of their drapery lent volume, and who lined up side by side in the plane of the picture almost without depth of space. Such were, for example, the Camaldolese monk-painter Lorenzo Monaco, who painted his Magi almost at the same time with Masaccio (1422), or Gentile da Fabriano, whose impressive Magi of 1423 was so successful that the Medici even recommended it as a model to Benozzo Gozzoli who painted the chapel of the Medici Palace in 1459. And in this style also worked the most acclaimed Florentine artist of the age, Lorenzo Ghiberti, who completed his masterpiece in 1424, the “Gate of Paradise” of the Baptistery.






In this atmosphere of reception, Masaccio probably needed no small degree of autonomy and renunciation of immediate success to develop his own individual style, based on the development of Giotto’s figures to the extreme, and on scenes only constructed with them, renouncing medieval “frills”. Characteristically, he could do this not in one of the major churches in the bourgeois old town, but in the workers’ neighborhood beyond the Arno, in the Brancacci Chapel of the Carmelite church between 1425 and 1427 (which I will talk about next week), and he summarized the result of it in the last and most important work of his life, the grave sculptural figures of the Trinity.

And the architectural frame comes from the same Filippo Brunelleschi whom we have already met a few times in the church, in connection with the dome of the Duomo in the Dominican fresco, the crucifix of the Gondi Chapel, or the pulpit. Here, Masaccio takes over his characteristic architectural structure from the Sagrestia Vecchia of San Lorenzo, or the façade of the Ospedale degli Innocenti.


But Brunelleschi had an even greater role in the construction of the Trinity’s space. It was him who first became interested in the proportion of the apparent heights of the columns of a colonnade seen in perspective, and by examining this he came to the formula of the central perspective: that is, that the lines that are parallel in reality, converge at a single point on a regular perspectivic representation. Brunelleschi was no painter, so he did not represent his calculatinons on a picture. This was first done by his close friend Masaccio, on this very fresco, which can thus be considered as the first regular perspectivic image in European art. The idea would be promoted by Leon Battista Alberti, a friend of both of them, in his already mentioned pictorial recipe book De pictura, but it was only published a quarter of a century after the Trinity fresco.


Contemporary and later critics primarily celebrated this illusionistic representation of space in Masaccio’s fresco. As Vasari writes in his 1568 Masaccio biography:

«Quello che vi è bellissimo, oltre alle figure, è una volta a mezza botte tirata in prospettiva, e spartita in quadri pieni di rosoni che diminuiscono e scortano così bene che pare che sia bucato quel muro.»

“What is beautiful in it, besides the figures, is the perspectively depicted vault, whose cassettes shrink and shorten so well, that the wall seems to be pierced.”

The shortening is so precise that an exact architectural drawing can be made of the virtual chapel behind the “pierced wall”. At the same time, it is noteworthy that a single element of the fresco disobeys the laws of perspective: the group of the Holy Trinity, depicted not in a bottom view as the figures of Mary and John, but frontally, as in medieval images. In the medieval picture, this had no significance, but in Masaccio’s strict perspectivic space it has: it suggests that God is above all the laws of this world, and cannot be anchored to a certain point in space:



Perspective suggests the unity of space. It’ about more than just placing Giottesque figures in an indefinite space, as with previous painters. Some radical change is happening here. The narration of previous images yields to sight. The image appears as an accurate representation of the instantaneous reality seen from a given point. Masaccio actually invented the camera, or at least the photo. Alberti, who did not yet know this device, describes the method with a different metaphor: he says that the image is an open window through which we view the scene depicted.

The birth of the illusionistic depiction diverts painting from its previous trajectory, and provides painters with a hammer so they must look for nails. Henceforth, the Renaissance is not a matter of choice, whether to use Giottesque figures and rocks to symbolize space. The new mode of representation and the new conception of image obliges, and not painting in this way means ignorance. Suddenly a new chapter starts in the history of European painting, which will end the same suddenly four and half centuries later, when Impressionism will take the illusionist representation to the extreme and exhaust all its possibilities, and the actual invention of the camera makes it superfluous anyway. Post-impressionist and avant-garde artists can then return with a calm soul to the pre-Masaccio perception, which does not reflect a sight, but constructs an image in the plane.

In addition to Vasari, Ghirlandaio expressed the appreciation of Masaccio’s contemporaries the best when, sixty years after Masaccio’s death, was commissioned to decorate the central Tornabuoni Chapel of Santa Maria Novella (1485-1490). Just as Masaccio borrowed visual elements from the prestigious chapels between 1426 and 1428, Brunelleschi’s Christ from the Gondi Chapel, or Christ and the two kneeling saints from Orcagna’s altar in the Strozzi Chapel, so Ghirlandaio now lifts back Masaccio’s virtual chapel in the very center of the sanctuary’s decoration, to the middle of the colored glass window, as a hommage to the master who marked the new path of Renaissance painting.