Masaccio
The young revolutionary of Florence.
Masaccio died at 26 but lived long enough to show the way for Renaissance painting. His fresco The Holy Trinity is one of the first pictures with correct linear perspective.
Masaccio’s real name was Tommaso di Ser Giovanni, and he was born on 21 December 1401 in San Giovanni Valdarno, a small town near Florence. The nickname Masaccio means roughly “sloppy Tom” and, according to Vasari, referred to his neglect of everything except art. He came to Florence early and joined the painters’ guild in 1422.
His most important work is the fresco cycle in the Brancacci Chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence, which he painted together with the older Masolino in around 1424–28. The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden shows Adam and Eve in naked despair. Eve cries out and Adam hides his face in his hands. In The Tribute Money the apostles stand around Christ like heavy statues in a real landscape. The chapel was restored in the 1980s, when the fig leaves later painted over Adam and Eve’s nakedness were removed.
Around 1427 he painted the fresco The Holy Trinity in Santa Maria Novella. It shows God the Father, the crucified Christ and the Holy Spirit in a chapel with a coffered vault. The architecture is painted in correct linear perspective, probably with the help of Brunelleschi’s new method. To the viewer it looks as if the wall opens into a room. It is one of the first surviving paintings in which perspective is used so consistently.
Masaccio’s figures are heavy and have bodies beneath their clothes. The light falls from a fixed direction, often the same as the real light in the chapel, and creates shadows that give volume. He took Giotto’s weight and gave it the space of perspective and the credibility of anatomy. He travelled to Rome in 1428 and died there the same year, only 26 years old. Rumours of poisoning exist but are unsubstantiated.
Despite his short life, Masaccio became one of the founders of the Renaissance. The Brancacci Chapel became a school for generations of artists. Young painters, Michelangelo among them, sat there drawing his figures.