Masaccio's "Trinity".

Rona Goffen, ed., Masaccio's "Trinity"

(Masterpieces of Western Painting.) New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xiii + 30 pls. + 166 pp. $44.95 (cl), $15.95 (pbk). ISBN: 0-521-46150-2 (cl), 0-521-46709-8 (pbk).

Ann Jensen Adams, ed., Rem brandt's "Bathsheba Reading King David's Letter"

(Masterpieces of Western Painting.) New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xiv + 35 pls. + 214 PP. $54.95 (cl), $15.95 (pbk). ISBN: 0-521-45391-7 (cl), 0-521-45986-9 (pbk).

New appraisals and reappraisals of the history of art are very much in the forefront of current scholarly research. The publication of Masaccio's "Trinity" and Rembrandt's "Bathsheba Reading King David's Letter. "therefore, present an opportunity to analyze two lauded works and their place in the discipline.

Masaccio's "Trinity" investigates what is considered one of the most significant paintings of the Italian Renaissance. The seven essays of this volume consider its historical and spiritual contexts, innovative depictions of time and space, and technique. Together they substantiate the innovation and complexity of Masaccio's work on every level. Celebrated for its solemn human and divine figures and a magnificent architectural setting created through the illusion of one-point perspective, the fresco of circa 1426 is shown to be one of the works that marks the change to a Renaissance style of painting.

One of the many strengths of Masaccio's "Trinity" is the introduction by the editor Rona Goffen. She begins by putting the picture in its historical context, with a lucid introduction to the humanism of the early Renaissance that would make excellent reading for a beginning student of any facet of the period. Similarly, the artistic innovations are described with great clarity followed by a history of Masaccio's career and his contributions.

The specialized essays that follow begin with a chapter by Gene Brucker on the secular forces that defined the world of Masaccio and his patrons. Then Goffen focuses on the spiritual forces that shaped Masaccio's fresco. She shows that despite its naturalistic idiom, profound layers of meaning are communicated through style, iconography, and references to sacred texts. It illustrates central Christian beliefs -- the Triune Godhead and the salvation of the Eucharist. But it also reflects Dominican spirituality and devotion to the corpus domini, so that it functioned as devotional image and commemorative monument. Goffen expounds upon the admired space within the picture, and its concomitant time. The hierarchical space is organized according to the placement of the mortal priest at the altar who offers the earthly Mass to the Trinity in the presence of living faithful -- it should be noted that this is an altarpiece -- while Christ, the eternal high priest, offers permanent self-sacrifice in the heavenly sanc tuary.

Ornella Casazza, who directed the recent restorations of the frescoes by Masaccio, Masolino, and Filippo Lippi in the Brancacci Chapel at Sta. Maria del Carmine in Florence, describes Masaccio's technique. With the new information brought to light there, she elucidates his working methods in the poorly preserved Trinity. Its earlier appearance is evoked through eyewitness accounts of the painting from the Renaissance and nineteenth century, as well as informed present-day evaluations of its condition. Wisely, Casazza has included terms in the glossary, and those are especially useful for, among other things, the description of how a fresco is removed. Jane Andrews Aiken addresses the painting's perspective. After an explanatory review of the substantial literature on the perspective, she goes on to show that Masaccio's and Brunelleschi's space was calculated according to the many projection techniques of late-medieval astronomers. The spatial illusionism in the architecture of the Trinity specifically reveal s the use of an astrolabe, which organized planar coordinates around a single point, and which, as in linear perspective, was associated with the act of seeing. By explaining the pragmatic use of this system, Aiken distinguishes it from Leon Battista Alberti's later linear perspective.

Nicely following these details on the science and history of perspective, in a semiological essay Yves Bonnefoy begins with a general exploration of the relationship between time and space. He asserts that in art the spiritual is timeless and denies space. The Middle Ages' reversed perspectives, simple modeling, and subordination of natural forms to geometric schema created a type of existential time, Bonnefoy argues. In the second part of the essay he notes that the development of perspective was at the heart of a vast intellectual and moral project; the move toward three-dimensional, believable space in painting took place in the historical moment when human beings could believe themselves to be at the center of the universe. Whereas at the outset of the Quattrocento the denial of space created a metaphysical timelessness, Renaissance perspectival space used time to represent sacred themes. Bonnefoy concludes that Masaccio used both metaphysical and measurable space and time. He created space favorable to temporal human actions and formulated the essential thesis of heroic humanism, but avoided total rationality. Rather, his designs were for a spectator around whom everything falls into place so that God is located within and all around the self, illustrating the classical axiom that the human is the center of all things.

The part of the Trinity that is below the altar is discussed by Katharine Park from several points of view. A skeleton rests on a classical sarcophagus above which is written in Italian, "I was once what you are, and what I am you also will be." Park identifies the skeleton as Adam and reminds us that the blood of Christ on the cross above the tomb seeps down to redeem Adam and humankind. It should be emphasized, moreover, that it is via the Mass on the altar table, which is an integral part of Masaccio's composition, that redemption is possible. Park goes on to clarify the Renaissance study of anatomy through the practice of dissection, and shows that while Masaccio's skeleton is inaccurate it is eminently believable, and until the time of the fresco perhaps the most accurate one in European art including anatomical treatises. Her essay and the volume conclude with what is perhaps the essential point of Masaccio's Trinity. Human mortality and the transitory nature of rank, fortune, beauty, and pleasure were inextricably linked with the means of achieving salvation. Rather than being at odds with this, the desire to show humans and the godhead realistically lay at the center of what it meant to know oneself in early fifteenth-century Christian spirituality.

Although not Rembrandt's most recognized picture, his Bathsheba Reading King David's Letter, of 1654, illustrates the qualities with which his name has been connected. His painterly style, with rich color, golden light, and varied texture is exemplified. As in his other history paintings, psychological insight is balanced with the narrative impulse. This volume offers six original essays about the Bathsheba and provides a sampling of current methodological tools. In an introduction Ann Jensen Adams offers a critical view of the artist and his depiction of the Old Testament heroine. She also reviews the Rembrandt literature in general and ably grapples with the problems represented by recently emerged approaches. Pointing out that an understanding of the effects of multiple methods is diverse from the realization that different approaches affect a comprehension of Rembrandt, the volume steers clear of becoming a survey of the Bathsheba according to various methods. It presents the artist and his work according to separate as well as overlapping configurations, including technology, biography, culture, images, and texts. Adams also notes that as an unusually introspective treatment of a female nude, the work offers opportunities to explore issues of gender, the body, and subjectivity. And while the essays do reflect different assumptions and examine different kinds of data, the issue of how gender is constructed visually by Rembrandt in one picture unites them, albeit to varying degrees.

Ernst Van de Wetering's essay is a case in point. Formal and perspectival devices are examined, and technical and material analyses are made clear to the non-specialist to facilitate an understanding of the artist's creative process. But while Van de Wetering explains changes in the arrangement of the figure and the drapery -- at an earlier stage Bathsheba looked upward and outside the picture space, and for Van de Wetering surely toward the lusting King David -- for the most part he avoids consideration of the larger issues implied by this change. He mentions many-layered connotations, and concludes that in the seventeenth century Bathsheba could be interpreted in several ways. If this informative technical chapter poses questions as to interpretation, the next by Eric Jan Sluijter confronts them directly. After tracing the visual tradition of Dutch representations of Bathsheba, and then Rembrandt's nudes, including Bathsheba, he locates the work in period moralizing discourses about the arousal of lust in l ife and art. Bathsheba's body is the source for potentially erotic behavior, but also consummate beauty. While the beholder is seduced, he argues, this takes place within the context of moral ambivalence. Rather than an active seductress she is a passive victim of her own beauty who ponders the choices she faces. Leo Steinberg cautions against the possibility of recovering the artist's sources and intentions. Voyeurism is evoked not by Rembrandt's actual treatment of Bathsheba but by the subject, and Steinberg observes that this Bathsheba is beautifully modest.

Mieke Bal describes the process of reading a painting from both a semiotic and deconstructivist point of view. Interpretations, she points out, are the result of the categories, or "mastercodes," in which the work is seen. She guides the reader through this particular reading by situating it in the categories of realism, the nude and history painting, each with its own assumptions, approaches, and occasional conflicts. Bal also discusses the relationship between an image and a text, which clarifies the semiotic approach to what occurs when literature becomes a visual subject.

Bal's tenet that there is no such thing as a fixed, pre-determined or unified meaning is demonstrated in a joint chapter by Svetlana Alpers and Margaret Carroll. Although both empathetically conflate the distant Bathsheba with Rembrandt's common-law wife, Hendrickje, and assume that she was the model, their conclusions are diverse. For Alpers, Bathsheba's illicit behavior with David corresponds to the relationship of Hendrickje, who at the time was accused by ecclesiastical authorities of "whorishness," and Rembrandt. Bathsheba's resistance to the artist's gaze acknowledges not only the complexity of their relationship, but also "modeling and being looked at, painting looking..." (158). Carroll sees Hendrickje/Bathsheba not in her role as David's mistress, but as Rembrandt's/Uriah's wife, and the intrusion of external authority as a threat to their domestic well-being. Rather than being shown as a possession, she possesses herself as she ponders the decision that will determine her own -- and Rembrandt's -- future. In an essay that explores the critical reception of the picture, Gary Schwartz also sees Bathsheba as a tragic heroine. His principal aim is to trace monetary and aesthetic evaluations by auction prices and descriptions. Along the way, he points out that other various elements, including the handling of paint, physical beauty of the subject, and psychological complexity, come into play in varying ways at varying times. At this point he confronts the critic's subjective perception of the nature of beauty in real life.

Of these two books, the second is more likely to provoke discussion. But both are essential reading not only for their respective pictures, but for their respective artists. And in each the essays work collectively to round out understanding of a key work and remind us of why scholarly attention has created a canon.