The Triumph of St Thomas Aquinas (detail)

1366 · Cappellone degli Spagnoli, Santa Maria Novella, Florence

religious

In the lower register of the fresco a uniform row of fourteen thrones extends like a line of choir stalls across the wall. The detail shows the right side thrones with female figures identified as the personifications of the liberal arts (from right to left: Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic, Music, Astronomy, Geometry, and Arithmetic). The antique and biblical representatives of the liberal arts (Priscian, Cicero, Aristotle, Tubalcain, Ptolemy, Euclid, and Pythagoras) are at their feet.

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The Triumph of St Thomas Aquinas (detail)

About the Artist

Andrea Da Firenze

Andrea da Firenze (Andrea Bonaiuti), Florentine painter. From January 1346 he was registered in the Arte dei Medici e Speziali in Florence. The earliest paintings that can be attributed to him suggest that he must have formed a close association with the workshop of Andrea di Cione. The small portable triptych of the Virgin and Child with Saints and Angels (centre panel, Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst; side panels of the Nativity and the Crucifixion, Houston,Museum of Fine Arts) shows the influence of Maso di Banco and of the painter of the Strozzi Chapel frescoes in the Chiostrino dei Morti, Santa Maria Novella, Florence. Andrea da Firenze is remembered mainly for his frescoes in the Spanish Chapel of Santa Maria Novella, Florence. This is a church of the Dominican Order, and the frescoes, illustrating the Triumph of the Faith and the Dominican doctrine, in both their severity and their meticulous detail, accorded with the expository style of the Dominican preaching friars. Andrea is last recorded in 1377 working on frescoes of the Life of St Raynerius in the Campo Santo at Pisa.

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