The Holy Trinity

Christ hangs crucified inside a coffered barrel-vaulted chapel, God the Father supporting the cross behind him, the Virgin and Saint John flanking, the donors kneeling at the threshold, and a skeleton in a tomb below inscribed “I was once what you are.” Painted around 1427 on a wall of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, it is the earliest surviving painting built on a single mathematically consistent vanishing point — perspective almost certainly worked out with Brunelleschi's help. Still in the church today, it is the technical hinge of the Renaissance: the moment painted space stopped being symbolic and became measurable.