Organized by Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza

JAY A. LEVENSON
The Museum of Modem Art, New York

JOSEPH J. KRAKORA and ELLEN BRYANT
National Gallery of Art, Washington

Masaccio's Trinity under the videocamera

As the first step in a projected multimedia educational project describing the origins of pictorial illusionism in the Renaissance, the National Gallery of Art has prepared a short, self-contained video on the creation of the Trinity. The video is intended to introduce general audiences, including visitors to S. Maria Novella, to Masaccio's remarkable innovation in the depiction of space.

With the help of the Opificio delle Pietre Dure and the city of Florence, close-ups of the fresco were taken under raking light in high-resolution digital video, while the scaffolding erected for the recent restoration was still in place. This footage allowed Masaccio's incised construction lines to be seen with remarkable clarity.

The video begins with a brief analysis of the perspective structure of the composition and a reconstruction of the pictorial space in virtual reality, as visualized by Antonio Criminisi of Microsoft Corporation using his Single Viewpoint Reconstruction technique. The video concludes with an animated recreation of the fresco's execution, based on the analysis of the giornate compiled by the Opificio's conservators.