(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
Masaccio
born Dec. 21, 1401, Castel San Giovanni [now San Giovanni Valdarno, Italy]
died , autumn 1428, Rome, PapalStates
byname of Tommaso Di Giovanni Di Simone Guidi important Florentine painter of
the early Renaissance whose frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel of the Church of
Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence (c. 1427) remained influential throughout
the Renaissance. In the span of only six years, Masaccio radically transformed
Florentine painting. His art eventually helped create many of the major
conceptual and stylistic foundations of Western painting. Seldom has such a
brief life been so important to the history of art.
Early life and works
Tommaso di Giovanni di Simone Guidi was born in what is now the town of San
Giovanni Valdarno, in the Tuscan province of Arezzo, some 40 miles (65 km)
southeast of Florence. His father was Ser Giovanni di Mone Cassai, a notary,
while his mother, Monna Iacopa, was the daughter of an innkeeper. Masaccio's
brother Giovanni was also an artist; called lo Scheggia (“the Splinter”), he is
known only for several inept paintings. According to the biographer Giorgio
Vasari (who is not always reliable), Tommaso himself received the nickname
Masaccio (loosely translated as “Big Tom,” or “Clumsy Tom”) because of his
absentmindedness about worldly affairs, carelessness abouthis personal
appearance, and other heedless—but good-natured—behaviour.
In the Renaissance, art was often a family enterprise passed down from father to
son. It is curious, therefore, that Masaccio and his brother became painters
even though none of their immediate forebears were artists. Masaccio's paternal
grandfather was a maker of chests (cassoni) which were often painted. It was
perhaps through his grandfather's connection with artists that he became one.
One of the most tantalizing questions about Masaccio revolves around his
artistic apprenticeship. Young boys, sometimes not yet in their teens, would be
apprenticed to a master. They would spend several years in his workshop learning
all the necessary skills involved in making many types of art. Certainly
Masaccio underwent such training, but there remains no trace of where, when, or
with whom he studied. This is a crucial, if unanswerable, problem for an
understanding of the painter because in the Renaissance, artwas learned through
imitation—individuality in the workshopwas discouraged. The apprentice would
copy the master's style until it became his own. Knowing who taught
Masacciowould reveal much about his artistic formation and his earliest work.
From his birthdate in 1401 until Jan. 7, 1422, absolutely nothing is known about
Masaccio. On the latter date he entered the Florentine Arte dei Medici e
Speziali, the guild to which painters belonged. It is safe to assume that by his
matriculation, he was already a full-fledged painter ready to supervise his own
workshop. Where he had been between hisbirth and his 21st year remains, like so
much about him, a tantalizing mystery.
Masaccio's earliest extant work is a small triptych dated April 23, 1422, or
about three months after he matriculated inthe Florentine guild. This triptych,
consisting of the Madonnaenthroned, two adoring angels, and saints, was painted
for the Church of San Giovenale near San Giovanni Valdarno andis now in the
Uffizi Gallery in Florence. It displays an acute knowledge of Florentine
painting, but its eclectic style, strongly influenced by Giotto and Andrea
Orcagna, does not allow us to discern whether Masaccio trained in San Giovanni
Valdarno or Florence before 1422. The triptych, nonetheless, is a powerfully
impressive demonstration of the skill of the young, but already highly
accomplished, artist. Compared to the lyrical, elegant art of Lorenzo Monaco and
Gentile da Fabriano, the leading painters of the International Gothic style,
Masaccio's forms are startlingly direct and massive. The triptych's tight, spare
composition and the unidealized and vigorous portrayal of the plain Madonna and
Child at its centre does not in the least resemble contemporary Florentine
painting. The figures do, however, reveal a complete understanding of the
revolutionary art of Donatello, the founder of the Florentine Renaissance
sculptural style, whose early works Masaccio studied with care. Donatello's
realistic sculptures taught Masaccio how to render and articulate the human body
and provide it with gestural and emotional expression.
After the Giovenale Triptych, Masaccio's next important work was a sizable,
multi-paneled altarpiece for the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine at Pisa in
1426. This important commission demonstrates his growing reputation outside
Florence. Unfortunately, the Pisa altarpiece was dismantled in the 18th century
and many of its parts lost, but 13 sectionsof it have been rediscovered and
identified in museums and private collections. The altarpiece's images, which
include the “Madonna and Child” (National Gallery, London) originally at its
centre, amplify the direct, realistic character of the 1422 triptych. Ensconced
in a massive throne inspired by classical architecture, the Madonna is viewed
from below and seems to tower over the spectator. The contrast betweenthe bright
lighting on her right side and the deep shadow on her left impart an
unprecedented sense of volume and depth to the figure.
Originally placed beneath the Madonna, the rectangular panel depicting the
“Adoration of the Magi” (Staatliche Museums, Berlin) is notable for its
realistic figures, which include portraits, most likely those of the donor and
his family. Like the “Madonna and Child,” the palette of the “Adoration of the
Magi” is notable for its deep, vibrant hues so different from the prevailing
pastels and other light colours found in contemporary Florentine painting.
Unlike hisfellow artists, Masaccio used colour not as pleasing decorative
pattern but to help impart the illusion of solidity to the painted figure.
The Brancacci Chapel. Shortly after completing the Pisa Altarpiece, Masaccio
began working on what was to be his masterpiece—the frescoes of the Brancacci
Chapel (c. 1427) in the Florentine Church of Santa Maria del Carmine. He was
commissioned to finish painting the chapel's scenes of the stories of St. Peter
after Masolino (1383–1447) had abandoned the job, leaving only the vaults and
several frescoes in the upper registers finished. Previously, Masaccio and
Masolino were engaged in some sort of looseworking relationship. They had
already collaborated on a “Madonna and Child with St. Anne” (Uffizi Gallery,
Florence) in which the style of Masaccio, who was the younger of the two, had a
profound influence on that of Masolino. It has been suggested, but never proven,
that both artists were jointly commissioned to paint the Brancacci Chapel. The
question of which painter executed which frescoes in the chapel posed one of the
most discussed artistic problems of the 19th and 20th centuries. It is now
generally thought that Masaccio was responsible for the following sections: the
“Expulsion of Adam and Eve” (or “Expulsion from Paradise”), “Baptism of the
Neophytes,” “The Tribute Money,” “St. Peter Enthroned,” “St. Peter Healing the
Sick with His Shadow,” “St. Peter Distributing Alms,” and part of the
“Resurrection of the Son of Theophilus.” (A cleaning and restoration of the
Brancacci Chapel frescoes in 1985–89 removed centuries of accumulated grime and
revealed the frescoes' vivid original colours.)
The radical differences between the two painters are seen clearly in the pendant
frescoes of the “Temptation of Adam and Eve” by Masolino and Masaccio's
“Expulsion of Adam and Eve,” which preface the St. Peter stories. Masolino's
figures are dainty, wiry, and elegant, while Masaccio's are highly dramatic,
volumetric, and expansive. The shapes of Masaccio's Adam and Eve are constructed
not with line but with strongly differentiated areas of light and dark that give
them a pronounced three-dimensional sense of relief. Masolino's figures appear
fantastic, while Masaccio's seem to exist within the world of the spectator
illuminated by natural light. The expressive movements and gestures that
Masaccio gives to Adam and Eve powerfully convey their anguish at being expelled
from the Garden of Eden and add apsychological dimension to the impressive
physical realism of these figures.
The boldness of conception and execution—the paint is applied in sweeping,
form-creating bold slashes—of the “Expulsion of Adam and Eve” marks all of
Masaccio's frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel. The most famous of these is “The
Tribute Money,” which rivals Michelangelo's “David” as an icon of Renaissance
art. “The Tribute Money,” which depicts the debate between Christ and his
followers about the rightness of paying tribute to earthly authorities, is
populated by figures remarkable for their weight and gravity.Recalling both
Donatello's sculptures and antique Roman reliefs that Masaccio saw in Florence,
the figures of Christ and his apostles attain a monumentality and seriousness
hitherto unknown. Massive and solemn, they are the very embodiments of human
dignity and virtue so valued by Renaissance philosophers and humanists.
The figures of “The Tribute Money” and the other frescoes inthe Brancacci Chapel
are placed in settings of remarkable realism. For the first time in Florentine
painting, religious drama unfolds not in some imaginary place in the past but
inthe countryside of Tuscany or the city streets of Florence, with St. Peter and
his followers treading the palace-lined streets of an early 15th-century city.
By setting his figures in scenes of such specificity, Masaccio sanctified and
elevated the observer's world. His depiction of the heroic individual in a fixed
and certain place in time and space perfectly reflects humanistic thought in
contemporary Florence.
The scene depicted in “The Tribute Money” is consistently litfrom the upper
right and thus harmonizes with the actual lighting of the chapel, which comes
from a window on the wall to the right of the fresco. The mountain background of
the fresco is convincingly rendered using aerial perspective;an illusion of
depth is created by successively lightening thetones of the more distant
mountains, thereby simulating the changes effected by the atmosphere on the
colours of distant objects. In “The Tribute Money,” with its solid, anatomically
convincing figures set in a clear, controlled space lit by a consistent fall of
light, Masaccio decisively broke with the medieval conception of a picture as a
world governed by different and arbitrary physical laws. Instead, he embraced
the concept of a painting as a window behind which a continuation of the real
world is to be found, with thesame laws of space, light, form, and perspective
that obtain in reality. This concept was to remain the basic idiom of Western
painting for the next 450 years.
The Trinity. “The Trinity,” a fresco in the Church of Santa Maria Novella, also
embodies important contemporary influences. Painted about 1427, it was probably
Masaccio's last work in Florence. It represents the Trinity (Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit) set in a barrel-vaulted hall before which kneel two donors. The
deep coffered vault is depicted using anearly perfect one-point system of linear
perspective, in which all the orthogonals recede to a central vanishing
point.This way of depicting space may have been invented in Florence about 1410
by the architect Filippo Brunelleschi. Masaccio's “Trinity” is the first extant
example of the systematic use of one-point perspective in a painting. One-point
perspective fixes the spectator's viewpoint and determines his relation with the
painted space. The architectural setting of “The Trinity” is derived from
contemporary buildings by Brunelleschi which, in turn, were much influenced by
classical Roman structures. Masaccio and Brunelleschi shared a common artistic
vision that was rational, human-scaled and human-centred, and inspired by the
ancient world.
Influence.
Documentation suggests that Masaccio left Florence for Rome, where he died about
1428. His career was lamentably short, lasting only about six years. He left
neither a workshopnor any pupils to carry on his style, but his paintings,
though few in number and done for patrons and locations of only middling rank,
made an immediate impact on Florence, influencing an entire generation of
important artists. Masaccio's weighty, dignified treatment of the human figure
and his clear and orderly depiction of space, atmosphere, and light renewed the
idiom of the early 14th-century Florentine painter Giotto, whose monumental art
had been weakened by the succeeding generations of painters. Masaccio carried
Giotto's more realistic style to its logical conclusion by utilizing
contemporary advances in anatomy, chiaroscuro, and perspective. The major
Florentinepainters of the mid-15th century—Filippo Lippi, Fra Angelico, Andrea
del Castagno, and Piero della Francesca—were all inspired by the rationality,
realism, and humanity of Masaccio's art. But his greatest impact came only 75
years after his death, when his monumental figures and sculptural use of light
were newly and more fully appreciated by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and
Raphael, the chief painters of the High Renaissance. Some of Michelangelo's
earliest drawings, for example, are studies of figures in “The Tribute Money,”
and through his works and those of other painters, Masaccio's art influenced the
entire subsequent course of Western painting.
Bruce Cole
