Masaccio

Among the Renaissance artists of the early years of the 15th Century, one name stands supreme in the art of painting, that of Masaccio.

Masaccio - Tribute Money, 1426-1427 Cappella Brancacci Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence

Born in Florence in 1401, the son of a poor notary, he lived only twenty-seven years, dying in Rome in misery and debt in 1428, but in that short life he had accomplished a stupendous work. The friend of Ghiberti, Donatello and Brunelleschi, instructed by the latter in the principles of perspective and architecture, the fruits of which we see in the architectural backgrounds of many of his frescoes, and this would seem to be his one debt to antiquity.

In all other respects, Nature was his teacher. Vasari says that "he perceived that painting is nothing but counterfeiting all the things of Nature vividly and simply," and Leonardo da Vinci writes that "he showed by his perfect works how those who take for their standard aught but nature—the mistress of all masters—weary themselves in vain."

Masolino and Masaccio Healing of the Lame and the Resurrection of Tabitha, 1425 Cappella Brancacci Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence

Masaccio was probably studying in Rome about 1418. Vasari tells of two pictures of his which were to be seen in the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore—one of Our Lady with four saints, the other of Pope Liberius with the features of Martin V.

The painter returned to Florence in 1420, and three years later was commissioned to continue the series of frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel of the Carmine which had been begun by his master, Masolino, in 1422, and were finished in 1484 by Filippino Lippi.

Seven of these would seem to be by the hand of Masaccio, and the beauty and originality of his work attracted all succeeding Florentine artists to come and inspire from it, so that this Chapel has been rightly called the school of modern painting.

As sheer art, his treatment of the nude, his powers of foreshortening, the pose and modeling of his figures were new things; to which must be added his talent for simplification—for eliminating all but the essential, his feeling for beauty and proportion, and above all his sense of the dignity of the human form. He made an epoch in the history of painting; the curious thing was that twenty years were to elapse before, as Lanzi puts it, those Renaissance artists who imitated him succeeded in arriving where he, who imitated no one, had already arrived.