The Trinity

The Trinity, painted around 1457 and now at the National Gallery in London, is the central panel of Pesellino's unfinished altarpiece, completed after his death by Filippo Lippi's workshop. The Trinity—Father, Son as crucified Christ, and Holy Spirit as dove—was the altarpiece's theological core, commissioned for a context where the doctrine of the Trinity required explicit visual affirmation. The unusual aspect of this commission is its completion by another hand, creating a work whose authorship is divided between Pesellino's design and Lippi's execution of certain passages.

The Trinity composition required Pesellino to reconcile the three persons of the Godhead within a unified image: typically, the Father holds the crucified Son while the dove descends above. The vertical hierarchy of the composition—Father above, Son below, Spirit connecting—is one of the iconographic conventions Pesellino works within while adding his own lyrical refinement.