Space in art is the sense of depth a painter builds on a flat surface, along with the emptiness left between and around things. Perspective, overlap, scale, haze and bare paper all produce it. The work where it shows best is Masaccio's Holy Trinity, a fresco painted on a church wall in Florence in the 1420s.
Space comes in two kinds. One is illusion: a wall that seems to open into a room, a valley that seems to run for miles. The other is real emptiness, a gap the painter leaves alone, and it carries as much meaning as anything drawn. Many pictures use both. Masaccio's fresco is the clearest case of the first, and it comes with a story about the man who praised it.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (140+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
The best known praise of that fresco comes from Giorgio Vasari, who wrote in his Lives of the Artists that the barrel vault was drawn in perspective so well that the wall appears to be pierced.
Then, in 1570, Vasari covered it himself. The will of a widow named Camilla Capponi called for a new altar to Our Lady of the Rosary on that stretch of wall, and his stone altar with a painted Madonna hid Masaccio's fresco completely.
The fresco stayed hidden for centuries. When it came to light again, it was detached from the wall and moved to the inner side of the church's front. In 1951 the lower part of the painting, a painted skeleton, was found still in its original position, and in 1952 the Trinity went back to its place. A picture famous for opening a wall had spent generations behind one.
Vasari's praise also leaves something out. A wall appears to open only for a person standing in the right place, and Masaccio had chosen that place with care.
Where did Masaccio want the viewer to stand?
On the church floor, in front of the wall, with the eyes at the height of the vanishing point…
What You'll Discover
What Brunelleschi held up to a mirror.
Why Tōhaku left so much paper bare.
How air became a ruler.
What the mirror in Vermeer's room shows.