The trifacial Trinity: the paintings the Vatican is hiding?
The Christian doctrine of the Trinity has been a source of theological debate and ever-evolving definition since the religion’s earliest days as merely a fringe sect of the Jewish community driven by apocalyptic eschatology in the days of Roman Judea. Laying out the nature of God as three separate persons in one entity, being the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the concept of the Trinity was an attempt to articulate the dimensions of Israel‘s creator, Jesus of Nazareth, and the spiritual binding between the two.
The Trinity has served as a key motif in Christian art. Typically depicted as a dove in the centre of Jesus and God, Father and Son, usually distinguished by age and dress. However, its earliest representation consists of a geometric triangle pointed toward each facet of the Trinity surrounding an eye in the middle, a symbol used to this day. One of the Trinity’s many artistic interpretations proved controversial; however, deemed provocatively unorthodox, it prompted a prominent debate in the Catholic Church’s 19th ecumenical council.
There’s no explicit reference to the Trinity in either the Old or New Testament, but biblical roots can be found in Genesis 18:1-3 when Hebrew patriarch Abraham is greeted by “Celestial Visitors”: “And the Lord appeared unto him in the plains of Mamre: and he sat in the tent door in the heat of the day, And he lift up his eyes and looked, and, lo, three men stood by him: and when he saw them, he ran to meet them from the tent door, and bowed himself toward the ground.”
This passage helped further the idea in the popular imagination that the Trinity may inhabit one unit or body. This perception was further theologically formalised in the First Council of Nicaea, an assembly held in AD 325 in the Bithynian city, now Turkey’s İznik, at the behest of Roman emperor Constantine I to establish consensus on the nature of God, as well as canonical law and a fixed date for Easter. While the concept can be traced back to 2nd-century scholar Theophilus of Antioch, it was the Nicene Creed that largely settled confusion and contention regarding the deity and eternality of Jesus Christ and established the Trinity as three persons sharing equal eternal importance.
Across the centuries until the Protestant Reformation that upended Catholic dominion over Western Europe in the 16th century, artistic impressions of the Trinity manifested as Jesus with three heads. Possessing far too much resemblance to the demons and monsters that bedevilled the bestiaries and depictions of Hell popular at the time, a shift toward the trifacial Trinity materialised, showing the Messiah with three faces on one head. There was some cultural precedent for this curious flourish. The Ancient Greek mythological goddess Hecate was often displayed as three-faced due to her association with lunar cycles and crossroads, but the ‘Cerberus’ glare given to Jesus was deemed too unsettling by church authorities, as well as contravening the principles of three separate persons.
The Council of Trent sought to officially condemn such paintings. Held between 1545 and 1563 in today’s Northern Italy as an alarmed response to Martin Luther’s reformist challenge to the Papacy, its final session decreed that all further imagery must reflect the subject depicted, free of any artistic flair which may obstruct the artwork’s holy appeal: “Every superstition shall be removed … all lasciviousness be avoided; in such wise that figures shall not be painted or adorned with a beauty exciting to lust… there be nothing seen that is disorderly, or that is unbecomingly or confusedly arranged, nothing that is profane, nothing indecorous, seeing that holiness becometh the house of God”.
This top-down censorship resulted in many trifacial Trinity pieces being destroyed and burnt on the orders of the Catholic clergy, anxious that the three-faced iconographies were too close to medieval diabolism and aberrational deviations from the triadic understanding of God. This forced many artists to hide their work from church authorities or edit out the offending multiple faces to pass the Papal censors. One such example was Spanish Neogranadine painter Gregorio Vásquez de Arce y Ceballos’ 1680 piece Symbol of the Trinity. Exhibited in Colombia’s Museo Colonial in Bogotá, it was discovered after a 1988 restoration process that for 400 years, the voluminous hair on Jesus’ head was masking two extra faces on either side of his centre gaze, an appeasing effort to save the destruction of his work and even possible state prosecution.
What followed was the Catholic-endorsed Baroque art era, an encouragement of splendour in contrast to the austere piety of Protestant architecture and cultural identity, emphasising rich colour, ornate intricacy, and awe-inspiring scope to heighten the religious subjects’ dramatic stir, seizing the attention of the masses and preserving the integrity of church doctrine with its busy collages of cherubs and heavenly wonder as exemplified in Andrea Pozzo’s The Apotheosis of Saint Ignatius or Annibale Carracci’s Assumption of the Virgin.
Despite its long and storied history of zealous persecution and oppressive dogmas, the Catholic Church has a towering role in shaping Western art, as well as scientific and philosophical pursuits. From Pope Julius II’s direct commissioning of Michelangelo‘s High-Renaissance masterpiece on the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, the Holy See evolved into a significant patron of the arts in contradiction with its religious censorship. The Vatican’s attack on trifacial Trinities illustrates this clash starkly, establishing doctrine to evoke a sacred relationship with God yet insecure enough to thwart creative endeavours filled with sincerity and theological merit because it might be expressed outside Papal control.
