The time has come to give Andrea De Bonaiuto his proper place in history as a true Renaissance artist. From the Spanish Chapel of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, Bonaiuto speaks to us as if God had deposited on his brush a form of higher truth inside of three major frescos; that is, truth in the form of a spiritual and polemical challenge that the observer must take to heart in order to decipher what he can identify as the difference between The Church Militant and The Church Triumphant.
Sometimes it is not easy to tell what the subject of a painting is truly about, because what the observer sees may not necessarily be the subject intended by its author. Such is the case with Andrea de Bonaiuto’s frescoes in the Spanish Chapel. Bonaiuto used his brush to expose that by using Aristotle’s method to evangelize, the Dominican Order was, in fact, brutalizing minds with deductive logic and scholasticism rather than elevating those minds with Christian values.
One of Bonaiuto’s most significant contributions to the Renaissance and to the domain of classical artistic composition is to have revealed the false underlying assumptions which caused the Dominican Order to be incapable, under their deductive logic, of accessing the higher truth of the Church Triumphant. The method that Bonaiuto used, therefore, exposes the devastating error of Dominican theology which, to this day, the Catholic Church has not seen fit to recognize.
