Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas

What it is

This fresco by Andrea di Bonaiuto, painted around 1360, decorates the Spanish Chapel in the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella. It shows a figure in black Dominican robes, understood to be Thomas Aquinas, enthroned under a Gothic canopy holding an open book, surrounded by seated robed figures and angels, with rows of figures below.

Why it matters

The fresco presents Dominican learning as an ordered system of knowledge, with Aquinas placed above personifications of the liberal arts and sciences. It reflects how, in the century after his death, the Dominican order used grand public art to promote Aquinas as the model scholar whose teaching brought together all fields of learning under theology.

Look closer

• Why might a religious order choose to paint a huge fresco celebrating a scholar rather than only a saint known for miracles?
• What does the arrangement of figures below Aquinas suggest about how knowledge was organized in medieval thought?
• What is left out of this image, and whose version of Aquinas's importance does it represent?