Ghiberti, Brunellesco, and Donatello about 1400 begin to study Nature and the Antique—The new secular spirit—Discontent with the old pictorial style expressed in reaction by Lorenzo Monaco—in cautious reform by Fra Angelico—and Masolino—in revolutionary reform by Masaccio—The Cassoni painters as illustrators of contemporary manners—Masaccio and the new structure in light and shade—The Problem of the Brancacci Frescoes—Masaccio’s enduring influence—The early Florentine Realists—Paolo Uccello and Perspective—Andrea del Castagno and Anatomy—Domenico Veneziano and Oil Painting—Alesso Baldovinetti.

In the two earlier chapters we have considered what Giorgio Vasari calls the vigorous childhood of Italian painting. We are now to observe its splendid youth. The story appropriately begins with three young men and the year 1401 and with a baby, later nicknamed Masaccio, who was born that same year. The three young Florentines represent the new time-spirit. The lucky one, Lorenzo Ghiberti, has just won a competition for the new bronze doors of the Baptistery, and has in that one commission more than twenty years of happy work ahead. Ghiberti is sensitive and thoughtful beyond the wont of the older craftsmen artists. He writes of an antique statue: “It has sweetness of modelling which cannot be caught either in a strong or a dim light, only the hand and touch can find it.” Ghiberti is a critic and analyst as well as a creator. In his “Commentaries,” a product of his old age, he writes: “Thus I have always sought for first principles, as to how nature works in herself, and how I may approach her, how the eye knows the varieties of things, how our visual power works, how visual images come about, and in what manner the theory of sculpture and painting should be framed.” This is the mood of the Renaissance in its most serious aspect.

This student mood was fully shared by two young friends of Ghiberti. Donatello, the sculptor, and Brunellesco, later the designer of the dome of the Cathedral at Florence, had lost in the competition for the Baptistery doors. They accepted defeat magnanimously, joined forces and went to Rome, where their persistent way of poking among the ruins got them the name of the treasure seekers. Such indeed they were, but the treasure they sought was not gold, but the secrets of the ancient sculptors and architects. So Donatello refined and perfected the rugged realism he had from nature. As early as 1416 he was to carve the alert and noble St. George for Or San Michele. Brunellesco’s life dream was that lightest and loveliest of domes which is still the architectural crown of Florence, and almost incidentally he threw off designs that filled Florence with elegant colonnades and churches which renewed the dignity and joyousness of the best Roman building. A resolute spirit, Brunellesco once tramped the sixty miles from Florence to Cortona to see a newly excavated statue. Not incidentally, then, but by hardest study, Brunellesco worked out a correct practice of linear perspective. This needed resource for the painter was now available when any one had the sense to ask for it, and all the time young Masaccio was growing up in San Giovanni up the Arno.

Such is the immediate background for the forward move in painting which begins in 1422, or thereabouts, and runs through fifty years of eager experimentation. As in the first revival the sculptors and architects had shown the way to the painters, so it was again. But there is also a remoter social and commercial background for the Early Renaissance which we must consider briefly. The great plague of 1348 cuts Florentine history sharply in two. It marked an acceleration of gayety and worldliness, of sports and pageantry. The chronicler Matteo Villani^[28] noted with amazement that the plague had caused not repentance but dissipation. He was shocked to see the old toga-like costume of the Florentines give place to the bobtailed jerkins and parti-colored hose borrowed from wicked France. Heritages were many and heirs few. You saw the gowns of gentle and noble ladies on backs of hussies or worse—the new wives. People ran to “the sin of gluttony, to feasts and taverns, delicate viands and games.” As for the poor folk, they no longer wished to work at their trades, they expected the costliest food, they married “ad libitum.” So began that loosening up of the old bourgeois morals which culminated in the carnivals of the end of the fifteenth century and in the libertine muse of Lorenzo the Magnificent. All this meant an inspiring spectacle for the artist to record, and plenty of lavish patronage, but also it meant a disintegrating tendency for art. Painting is great in Florence in the measure that it escapes the mere expansiveness of the times and seeks discipline. As if to assert the permanency of the spirit of discipline, the very year that set Matteo Villani in despair, 1348, gave him also a chapter on the founding of the Studio, a school of higher learning which eventually became the University of Florence. And the course of art for most of the fifteenth century was to be a constant interplay and rivalry between the Florence of the tavern and race-course and the Florence of the Studio, with a final victory for the latter.

Oddly enough, the new luxury and gayety and the new scholarship conspired to make the old painting inadequate. The panoramic style of the fourteenth century was too simple and unornate for the Frenchified Florentines; for the new generation of strenuous artists, it was too slight and unskilful. All the finer spirits at the beginning of the fifteenth century are malcontents. Their unrest expressed itself, according to temperament, in progress or reaction. The dominating artist of the moment was a reactionary, Don Lorenzo Monaco,^[29] Camaldolese monk. Turning from the superficiality of the current Florentine style, he sought his corrective at Siena, his birthplace, in the decorative exquisiteness of Simone Martini and the narrative warmth and breadth of the Lorenzetti; and he imports these qualities into Florence in an art as aristocratic and retrospective as that of our own Pre-Raphaelites. In his hands Gothic painting takes a new and unwarranted lease of life. He is a brilliant colorist, a fastidious designer, an austere spirit. Even his great Sienese exemplars have hardly surpassed his masterpiece, the Coronation of the Virgin, in the Uffizi. It is dated 1413. In the richness of the Gothic frame, the profusion of small incidental figures, the festooning curves of the swaying saints and angels, and formal symmetry of arrangement, it well represents the most florid type of Gothic painting as developed at Siena. It is hard to realize that this lovely mediæval work was painted at the moment when Brunellesco and his friends were already turning sharply to nature and to the vision of Hellas. But Lorenzo was a cloistered man, and appropriately a votary of past perfections. His devout mood is best expressed in the gracious Annunciation, Figure 71, which has happily never left its original altar in the Church of the Trinità. Here Lorenzo follows the Lorenzettian canons of space. A girlish delicacy in the obedient Virgin is a new note, to be echoed more sweetly by Lorenzo’s best follower, Fra Angelico. Lorenzo died in 1425. Masaccio had already created the new style of painting, but for a couple of decades faithful disciples of Don Lorenzo carried on his style.

A lover of Plutarchian parallels and contrasts would swiftly pass from Don Lorenzo Monaco to Masaccio. But one may better understand the new movement by taking first men who gradually and normally accepted the new knowledge. Such are Fra Angelico and Masolino, who began as Gothic painters and ended as Renaissance masters. They show us better the average drift of the times than does so revolutionary a figure as Masaccio.

Fra Angelico^[30] was born in 1387 and at twenty entered the religious state as a Dominican at Fiesole. How soon Fra Giovanni, not yet nicknamed Angelico, became a painter we hardly know. But four little pictures designed to inclose in their frames relics of the saints may represent his beginnings. Three are at San Marco, Florence, one in Mrs. John L. Gardner’s collection at Boston. The Little Annunciation with an Adoration of the Magi, Figure 72, may represent the work. It is refined, tender, of jewel-like freshness of color, graceful in linear arrangement, at first sight wholly Sienese in inspiration, and directly dependent on Lorenzo Monaco. A kind of veracity under the richness of the expression marks the work as after all straightforward and Florentine. The date may be about 1425, Fra Angelico, being in his middle thirties, and in his art about a century behind the times. In his early Gothic manner he conceived some of his masterpieces, such as the Coronation of the Virgin, with its glimpse of a celestial cloud land; and the whimsically beautiful Last Judgment. Both are at the Museum of San Marco. One can believe the report of Vasari that each day Fra Angelico prayed before touching brush to such masterpieces. Such pictures have the hush and charm of a celestial dreamland, a meditative beauty quite un-Florentine.

All the time Fra Angelico was placidly and intelligently studying the new realistic movement launched by Donatello and Masaccio. He adopts what suits him, rejecting heavy shadows which would dull his Gothic coloring, but adding freely realistic details in anatomy, drapery, and architecture. The Coronation of the Virgin in the Louvre, Figure 73, though it may be only a few months later than that of the Uffizi, no longer takes place in a cloudland before lucent gold, but in a quite practicable architecture imitating the niche which Michelozzo designed in 1423 for Donatello’s St. Louis of Toulouse. The forms too are more substantial, more mundane. Soon the architectural accessories become of Renaissance type, and as Mr. Langton Douglas has shown, every new invention of Michelozzo for a space of ten years is promptly reflected in the painting of Fra Angelico. His greatest Madonna, that of the Linen Guild, Figure 74, painted in 1433, is almost plastic, recalling the severe sweetness of Orcagna. The picture is really cumbered by the rich hangings, which with the slender swaying angels in the bevel of the frame are already an anachronism. In the Descent from the Cross, Figure 75, we find Fra Angelico skilfully adopting the new discoveries in anatomy and landscape. The treatment is broad and panoramic in the tradition of the Lorenzetti but all the details are carefully studied from nature and not furnished by formula. A deeply felt scene thus gains verisimilitude, comes out of the realm of legend and becomes an actuality. The panel was finished in 1440, and, now that Masaccio was gone, there was no living painter who could have put into it with equal knowledge so much feeling.

The building of the great Dominican Convent of San Marco between 1437 and 1444 opened to Fra Angelico his great opportunity. It was the gift of Cosimo de’ Medici, now unofficial ruler of Florence, who had his good reasons for wishing to assure the occasional repose of his busy soul in this world and its permanent repose in the next. He often sought seclusion in the convent and doubtless saw in progress the fifty or more frescoes that Fra Angelico made to adorn it. Fra Angelico was painting for deeply religious men, for scholars who had the Scriptures at their finger tips, and for this reason perhaps he rejects all smaller realisms, reducing his compositions to the mere figures. Thus the San Marco frescoes are more concise even than those of Giotto, and they reach at their best a simple sublimity as yet unattained in Italian art. Highly formal and decorative, they are free from consciously æsthetic taint. Sometimes I think Perugino learned much at San Marco and that we may thus regard Fra Angelico as indirectly a leading influence on Raphael. The sparse, effective method may be illustrated in the fresco set over the door of the guest quarters, the Forestiera. It represents a pilgrim Christ being received by Dominican brothers. Figure 76. In the stranger we entertain The Lord Himself is the simple lesson. The figures are set against a conventional blue background but are constructed with the authority of the new learning.

In the Chapter House nearby Fra Angelico painted, about 1440, a great Crucifixion, Figure 77. The three laden crosses stand out sharply against a murky sky. The setting is a mere platform, on which the familiar forms of Mary and the beloved Apostles are almost lost in a throng of witnesses of every age. We have the Latin Fathers, and their successors—St. Dominic and St. Francis, among others. The arrangement is highly formal, the mood that of meditation; the sharper tragedy of the theme is not insisted on. The characterization of the saints is precise and fine, the drawing of their forms admirable. Had the composition been set against a Gothic, blue background, the mood would have seemed merely sentimental. What gives it, with all its abstractness, an almost sensational tang of reality is the arching sky, slaty above and an ominous orange behind the figures. The expedient brings an element of definite place and time of day for this rendezvous of saints at a mystically renewed Calvary.

In the cells of the convent, Fra Angelico and his helpers painted no less than forty-three frescoes. These were intended for the private devotions of the brother occupying the cell, and the subjects were probably chosen not by Fra Angelico himself, but by his cloister mates. The best are conceived like the frescoes of the lower story. The background is just a veiled sky, there are no accessories, the figures loom in an indefinite space. Majestic is the Transfiguration, Figure 78, very lovely the Coronation of the Virgin. The angelic painter draws the maximum effect from the simplest patterns and briefest means. There is the measured and simple dignity of the early Christian mosaics with a warmer and more personal feeling. Fra Angelico, when he wishes, can be elaborately realistic. He is so in the garden scene where the Risen Christ gently rebuffs the Magdalen, in the crowded Adoration of the Magi, which tradition assigns to Cosimo de’ Medici’s cell, and in the Annunciation, Figure 79, in the corridor with its graceful Renaissance loggia. In this more circumstantial vein, Fra Angelico is delightful, but I think below his best. In all the frescoes at S. Marco, however, Fra Angelico appears as a wholly Florentine figure with an art based at once on the study of nature and on an understanding admiration for the masterpieces of Giotto and Orcagna.

Something of his mediævalism, of his Sienese manner, persists in the numerous little predella panels, such as those telling delightfully the story of the doctor saints, Cosmo and Damian, and the series with the life of Christ which adorned the doors of the plate lockers of the Church of S. Marco. With their fully developed pictorialism, their careful regard for the minor realisms of setting, these little pictures are the prelude to his last phase at Rome. They are also the last Florentine pictures that observe those traditional iconographical forms which had persisted for four centuries.

Fra Angelico ever refused to make money or accept promotion, but became despite himself a celebrity. In 1445 he was ordered to Rome by Pope Eugenius IV. The frescoes which Fra Angelico then made in the Vatican are lost. There was an escape to Orvieto, where Fra Angelico painted half the vault of the Chapel of S. Brixio, which Signorelli was later to complete. Fra Angelico was peremptorily recalled to Rome in 1447 by the new Pope, Nicholas V, who was planning a new chapel in the Vatican. We see it today still radiant with the legends of St. Stephen and St. Lawrence that Fra Angelico thoughtfully composed more than four hundred years ago. Modern critics have generally agreed in finding Fra Angelico’s masterpieces in this chapel. If they mean his fullest display of knowledge, the opinion is incontestible. Nowhere else has Fra Angelico invented such complications of architecture, interiors, street perspectives; nowhere has he drawn better figures in greater variety. Such frescoes as the lunette with St. Stephen defending himself before the Jewish doctors and preaching to the people, Figure 80, or that depicting St. Lawrence giving alms to cripples and poor folk before a basilica, are learned and rich. But does not their very richness obscure both the decorative and emotional appeal? Personally I tend to lose the figures in the complexity of the setting. Any of Fra Angelico’s little predellas tells its story more feelingly and clearly, and no less ably. Under the pressure of competition at Rome, Fra Angelico for the first time is ostentatious. To please the Pope he revives in more specious form the trivialities of the old panoramic style. Had he grasped Masaccio’s invention of aerial perspective and construction in light and dark, Fra Angelico might have carried off his elaborate settings successfully. As it is, they confuse the eye by too many linear elements, and only mildly delight the mind. Even the sensitive mood of legend, which is noteworthy in these frescoes, is better represented in the smaller panels. In fairness of Gothic fresco coloring, however, they are unsurpassed.

From the point of view of tendency, these frescoes are profoundly instructive. They show the irresistible drift towards the formation of a new panoramic style, a drift that even Fra Angelico, cloistered saint and exquisite self-critic, was unable to escape. In spite of his record and better knowledge, he becomes an inaugurator of that picturesque, undisciplined, and decentralized manner of narrative which was to be represented by Ghirlandaio, Botticelli, and their contemporaries.

In his later years Fra Angelico declined the archbishopric of Florence and died at Rome in 1455. The tombstone which shows the emaciation of his perishable form is in the Roman Church of the Minerva; his imperishable monument is his frescoed convent home of S. Marco at Florence.

Of the traditional artists Fra Angelico is by far the most important, but his contemporary Masolino of Panicale must be considered, partly because tradition makes him the master of Masaccio, partly because of the problems which cluster about his work. The picture which is here drawn of him represents my own investigations, and differs at several points from the views of Berenson and Toesca. If we judge Masolino only by the work that is unquestionably his, he is not an impressive figure. He inherits the grace of the late Gothic style, and he adds rather partially and inconsequentially the new discoveries in anatomy and linear perspective. Chance took him away from the centre of things, Florence. He worked mostly in Lombardy, distant Hungary, provincial Tuscany, and Rome. He has industry and charm, but nowhere shows much intelligence. On the whole he is a poorer story-teller than his Gothic predecessors, and only their fair equal in panel painting. Had Vasari not ascribed to him, I believe erroneously, the early miracles of St. Peter in the Church of The Carmine, at Florence, the general historian of art would need to pay little attention to Masolino. But he has been entangled in one of the most important of artistic problems, that of Masaccio, so we cannot ignore him.

Masolino^[31] was born in 1384, and, according to Vasari, was trained by the mysterious Starnina. We have no very early works to show his progress, and it is merely a good guess that the radiant Annunciation, Figure 81, in the possession of Mr. Henry Goldman, New York, may be considerably earlier than 1420. It shows the gentleness and animation which are constant in Masolino. It combines the Sienese calligraphic manner with those smaller realisms of inscenation which ultimately derive from Duccio. It has coloristic audacities of its own in the spotting of brightest vermillion. It gives small hint of the Renaissance. At a later date than 1420, by which time ordinary perspective began to be understood, I doubt if Masolino would have indulged in that preposterous and unnecessary central pillar which starts above in middle distance and ends below in the picture plane. A Madonna at Bremen, dated 1423, shows him still as Gothic as Lorenzo Monaco, who indeed seems to have influenced him dominatingly.

In this same year, it is likely that he painted the frescoes in the Collegiate Church at Castiglione d’Olona, a lovely village at the foot of the Alps. Masolino had to deal with refractory spaces, the narrow triangular sectors of the apse. This has caused elongation of the figures and piling up of fantastic architecture merely to fill the spaces. The mood is gentle and graceful, the treatment quite Gothic. These six stories of the Virgin must have satisfied Masolino’s humanist patron, Cardinal Branda Castiglione; for several years later he re-employed the painter to decorate the adjoining Baptistery. Masolino at forty, in the Collegiate Church, was still completely Gothic. If we may believe Vasari, at that age he suddenly mastered the new style. Only on such a theory can he have painted the Adam and Eve and the St. Peter reviving Tabitha, in the Brancacci Chapel, which are in the new chiaroscuro technic. Since Masolino, years after the time when he was working in that chapel, is still incompletely modern as regards light and shade, it is easier to suppose that what he actually painted in the Brancacci Chapel, about 1424, was merely the vault and the three lunettes, which have since been destroyed. Thus all the frescoes now visible in this famous chapel would be by Masaccio or his continuer, Filippino Lippi. Such was the view of the excellent critic Cavalcaselle more than fifty years ago. However that be, Masolino by 1427 was at Buda (now Budapest), where he worked for that extraordinary Florentine exile and soldier of fortune, Pippo Spano. After that trip, we hear no more of Masolino at Florence—rather oddly, since the Brancacci Chapel, which he had begun, still had three unpictured spaces after Masaccio’s death in 1428. Apparently the Brancacci family did not consider Masolino competent to complete the work he had begun. If so, they were wise.

We next find Masolino, after an interval of more than ten years, decorating the Baptistery at Castiglione d’Olona for his old patron, Cardinal Branda. The date is 1435. By this time Masolino had learned a good deal, but had hardly assimilated his new attainments. Whether as decoration or as story-telling, the stories of St. John the Baptist are at once confused and pretentious, with little to recommend them save the loveliness of their Gothic color, the prettiness of the heads, and certain vivacious and well-observed gestures. In the great fresco of the Baptism of Christ, Figure 82, the incidental nudes are so carefully anatomized that they distract from the general effect, while the deep river valley unhappily draws the eye away from the figures in the foreground. A similarly pictorially inept use of foreshortened Renaissance colonnades appears in the opposite fresco depicting the Feast of Herod and the delivery of the head of St. John to Herodias. If it were not for the physical discomfort of travelling to the end of those interminable colonnades and returning to note what is happening nearby in them, these stories themselves would seem vivacious and well-conceived, the female heads attractive, the color gay and pleasing. The method of composition is still Lorenzettian and the modern architectural features inorganic.

A few years later Masolino was swept to Rome by the great wave of rebuilding and redecorating which accompanied Pope Martin V’s return from Avignon. There in the Chapel of the Sacrament, in the venerable Basilica of S. Clemente, which had formerly been Cardinal Branda’s titular Church, Masolino achieved his maturest work. Completely repainted, we may still see the legends of St. Catherine, and a finely theatrical Calvary by Masolino, and as well legends of St. Ambrose by a follower of Masaccio. Here Masolino’s gift as a story-teller is at its best. He has learned to subordinate his accessories, and the childlike character of his themes enlists his talent in its most engaging aspect. Such a fresco as St. Catherine urging the mysteries of the faith before the Roman doctors, Figure 83, is well-felt and skilfully composed, and withal most flimsily drawn. It is incredible that a man who could do the Tabitha in the Brancacci Chapel at forty should have relapsed to this level at fifty-five. The evidence of the armor^[32] worn by the horsemen in the Calvary proves that that fresco, and presumably the entire decoration of the chapel, cannot be earlier than 1440, while of course it cannot be later than Masolino’s own death in 1447.

To this later period belongs, I believe, the diptych at Naples which represents two themes rare in early Florentine painting, the Assumption of the Virgin, and the Miracle of the Snow, Figure 84. The latter scene shows Pope Liberius tracing the foundations of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore which were indicated by a miraculous snow-fall in midsummer. It is delightful as story-telling, and some of the minor figures are entrancing, as is the landscape. Since Michelangelo and Giorgio Vasari once admired this picture together at Rome, we should not grudge it our admiration. Nor should we fail to note the curious defects in construction. The heads of the attendant figures are set on the shoulders like a ball on a post. You could blow any of these heads off without overtaxing your lungs. The picture shows the utmost of which Masolino was capable. It reveals him as lightly touched by the new learning and faithful to the old panoramic ideals of narrative which had come down from Taddeo Gaddi and the Lorenzetti.

Logically we should next consider Masaccio, but first we may well give an eye to a minor sort of narrative painting which worked in the direction of contemporary realism. This was domestic painting as distinguished from ecclesiastical or civic.^[33] In a prosperous Florentine home the chest was the most important article of furniture. In the fifteenth century its front was pictured with races, pageants, feasts, battles, or the new themes from classical mythology. Every patrician bride normally received two such painted cassoni to contain her trousseau. For example,^[34] Giovanna di Filippo Aldobrandini when she married Tommaso di Berto Fini, in 1418, received two bride chests depicting the races on St. John’s day. A complete chest in the Bargello, Florence, shows the riders carrying to the Baptistery the palii, or lengths of brocade which were the prizes. The front panel of the companion chest is in the Holden Collection, at Cleveland, and commemorates with extraordinary vivacity and fidelity the race itself, Figure 85. The winner is just preparing to touch the palio which hangs from the ceremonial car at the finish. Jesters, policemen, eager women, and impatient urchins who pelt the losers make up a remarkable picture of contemporary customs. Besides the pictured chests, a well appointed room had at the height of a sitter’s shoulder similar but larger panels which were called Spalliere. And still higher there was, on a still larger scale, what were called cornice panels. These too were contemporary or mythological in subject matter. Where many a room thus had three courses of pictures from the floor to the ceiling there was abundant opportunity for the narrative painter and remarkable stimulus to invention. The richness and complexity of this household decoration doubtless influenced all narrative painting, making for the sprightliness which dominates the end of the century.

Besides these chest and wall panels, pictured salvers were prepared to celebrate the birth of a patrician child. Such wooden salvers were used to convey the congratulatory gifts which were offered with appalling promptness to every young mother. These Deschi da parto, or birth plates, as the Italians called them, bore pictures alluding either to love and beauty or to childbirth. One of the earlier mythological salvers is in the Bargello and represents the Judgment of Paris. As yet the artist is not sufficiently audacious to display the goddesses in classical nudity. The most famous of all birth-plates may serve as our introduction to the greatest artist of the first half of the century, Masaccio. It is in the Berlin Museum, the subject is the Birth of St. John the Baptist, Figure 86, and the date should be about 1422. In the excellent proportions of the Renaissance portico, in the gravity and mass of the figures, it shows the beginnings of a new and more truthful style, based not on previous artistic formulas but on direct and masterful observation of nature. Mr. Berenson justly calls it “a little giant of a picture.”

Masaccio^[35] was born December 21, 1401, at San Giovanni up the Arno. His real name was Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Tommaso Guidi. And the slightly slurring character of his nickname was apparently given for absent-mindedness, untidiness, and a certain clumsiness of person. Tradition as late as Vasari declared that Masaccio lived in a world of intense speculation concerning his art. Contemporary tax-returns show that he died deeply in debt and that he never really knew how much he owed. Tradition again insists that he never troubled to collect payments due him unless his need of money were extreme.

All the same he was one of the most original minds of all ages, and on the formal side, one of the most revolutionary. He came to Florence early, probably learned his elements under Masolino, but really drew more from the sculptor naturalists of Donatello’s sort. In particular he frequented the surly architect Brunellesco and from him learned the new art of perspective. January 7, 1422, being twenty-one years old, Masaccio was matriculated in the Druggists’ Guild as a licensed painter. By this time he surely had made his great discovery and taken his great decision. Reviewing the painting of his contemporaries and predecessors, he judged that it was all based on unnatural conventions. We can imagine him in the Spanish Chapel viewing the carefully charted and contoured and colored groups, and saying impatiently “things don’t look like that.” And in truth the older painting at its best was a select inventory or formal description of what the artist saw, and not a representation. One can imagine Masaccio exclaiming, as Francisco Goya was to do more than three centuries later, “Lines, always lines, I don’t see them in nature.” And, as a matter of fact, there are no lines in nature, just the meeting of areas variously colored and lighted, contrasts of tone which the eye instantaneously interprets as form.

Young Masaccio, then, makes the radical innovation that the brush should work according to nature’s laws, distributing color and light and dark so as to give the swiftest and truest representation of mass and distance. Besides functional light and shade, Masaccio introduced into painting the idea of aerial perspective. He saw that distant objects diminished not merely in size but also in definition. He felt the air as a palpable veil between the object and the eye, and he painted not simply the object but, as well, its veil. By a swift impulse of sheer genius this moody lad fixed ideals of naturalistic painting which were to remain until yesterday and the Impressionists. In fundamental principles Velasquez marks no great advance on Masaccio.

It is only in fresco painting that Masaccio fully reveals his powers. So passing with mere mention such panels as The Healing of a Demoniac, in the John G. Johnson Collection, Philadelphia, the widely scattered parts of the altar-piece for the Carmelites at Pisa, dated 1426, and the grim Madonna with St. Ann in the Uffizi, the student will best turn directly to the Carmelite Church at Florence and enter that sanctuary of art, the Chapel of the Brancacci. The Church itself was dedicated April 19, 1422. Shortly after that date, young Masaccio did in fresco the dedicatory procession with many portraits. Its realism produced a profound impression. Nevertheless it was heedlessly destroyed after a century or so. By 1424, according to all probability, Masaccio was associated with Masolino in the decoration of the Brancacci Chapel. It was dedicated to St. Peter, and the prescribed subjects were drawn from the “Acts of the Apostles” and “The Golden Legend.” The vaults which contained the four evangelists and the three lunettes, which depicted The Calling of Peter and Andrew, the Tempest-tossed Ship of the Apostles on Galilee, and Peter denying his Lord, were by Masolino. Unhappily these upper frescoes have been destroyed. The Chapel now has only two rows of frescoes in twelve pictures. Of these three and a part of a fourth, all in the lower row, are certainly by Filippino Lippi, who about 1484 completed the chapel, probably with the aid of Masaccio’s designs. Three in the upper row, are ascribed by many critics to Masolino. According to this view, which is largely based on the opinion of Vasari, Masaccio would be responsible for only five pictures and most of a sixth. Other critics, whose views I share, believe that Masaccio painted eight of the pictures and most of a ninth. The difference of opinion, then, concerns three pictures which many think unworthy of Masaccio’s genius. The problem cannot be fully debated here. The grounds of my opinion, which was that of the great Italian critic Cavalcaselle, will appear as we review the frescoes themselves.

In general color effect these frescoes are strangely unlike their Gothic predecessors. They have nothing of the flower-bed gayety of the Spanish Chapel, of Lorenzo Monaco, or of Masolino elsewhere. The effect is of a very rich smokiness, a kind of monochrome from which only subdued colors emerge. Yellow-browns and silvery grays predominate. There are no hard contours. The relief is salient, but one form blends insensibly into another. The edges of the figures are established not by lines but by contrast of values, the contour is often completely lost. The strong assertion of light and dark in a few structural planes builds out the forms from an investing shadow. Indeed the whole chapel recalls not the Gothic fresco painters, but such far later artists as Velasquez, Rembrandt, or even Whistler. The method of the painter, whoever he was, is completely modern, and uniform throughout the chapel. He sacrifices minute definition to generalizations for mass; and color, to emphatic construction in light and shade. To obtain relief in the figures and distance in the backgrounds is the main concern. It is in intention a luminist art and a modelling art. The procedure is nearly uniform throughout the Brancacci Chapel, though it grows abler from fresco to fresco. It is a method that Masolino never commanded, not at Castiglione d’Olona ten years later, nor still ten years later at San Clemente, Rome. Hence I can only believe that the admitted inequalities in the Brancacci Chapel merely represent the swift development of Masaccio’s genius, and certain interruptions in the work itself.

The first fresco, in the nave alongside, the entrance of the chapel, depicts our first parents at the moment of the Temptation in the Garden of Eden, Figure 87. It is stilted and awkward, yet withal dignified. The theme, which indeed has seldom been a happy one for any artist, has not greatly interested the painter. He has made it an occasion for studying the nude. We have what the modern student calls an academy. As such, it is able. The construction is highly simplified and is wholly in masses of light and dark, the contour is freely effaced. The mystery of background foliage is well suggested, the placing of the head of the serpent between the tree and the figures is a perfect example of the new art of aerial perspective. No painter but Masaccio had even the notion of such an effect at this moment. Technically the handling of this detail is just the same as that of the vastly more beautiful angel in the Expulsion from Eden, Figure 91. Finally, the impassive mask of the Eve is identical with that of the Virgin, in Masaccio’s panel in the Uffizi. We presumably have to do with an experimental phase of Masaccio about the year 1423–5. About that time Masolino probably was called to Buda to work for the extraordinary Florentine soldier of fortune, Filippo Scolari, better known by his nickname of Pippo Spano. If Vasari is right, Masaccio had been required to prove his ability to continue the work by painting a St. Paul near the bell-cord of the Church, in competition with a St. Jerome by Masolino. Both are lost.

However that be, Masaccio probably succeeded to the work in 1425, his twenty-fourth year, and the next fresco after the Adam and Eve may well have been the adjoining subjects of Peter raising Tabitha from the Dead and healing a Cripple, Figure 88. As a whole the composition is somewhat marred by inadvertences and afterthoughts. It shows the influence of Masolino in the trite and conventional gestures of the mourners about the bier, and in certain strained facial expressions, notably that of the turbaned bystander. Such survivals are precisely what one would expect in a young painter just emancipated from his master. The entirely Masolino-like pair of strollers in the centre seem to be due to an afterthought. The first intention is registered in the unnaturally straight back of St. Peter’s companion, in the centre. The fresco was apparently to have been cut into two compartments by a pilaster at that point.^[36] When the plan was abandoned in favor of putting two episodes in one space, the two unrelated figures had to be added to fill space and provide a transition. One is a little ashamed of pointing out small defects in what in all essentials is a noble and impassioned work. Technically there is nothing better in the Chapel than the establishing of the city background. It has scale, admirable atmospheric placing, dignity and pictorial significance. How anybody who knows Masolino’s niggling and haphazard treatment of such architectural features at Castiglione d’Olona can imagine that he had earlier created this grandiose setting remains a mystery to me. Even more remarkable are the gravity and grandeur of the Peter and the Tabitha. Here we are reminded of Giotto. Masaccio must often have pored over the Stories of St. John in Santa Croce, and while he by no means adopted Giotto’s shorthand indications for mass, he did adopt Giotto’s sense for classic dignity, beautifully calculated order, and moderation. As we continue through these remarkable frescoes we shall see continually that the quite ruthless innovator that was Masaccio was also a reverent traditionalist. The particular form of his art was settled between nature and himself, as Leonardo da Vinci later justly observed; the spirit of his art derived mostly from Giotto. It was highly important for the whole ongoing of art in Italy that so revolutionary a spirit was tempered by the finest respect for the great classic tradition. And in this great fresco of St. Peter’s miracles one may see how a quite homely and drastic realism can be invested with abstract power and dignity. How different it all is from the small and often charming vivacity which Masolino displays at Castiglione d’Olona and at Rome.

Like the Temptation, the Tabitha is more linear and colorful than the other frescoes of the Chapel. The painter has not quite mastered the radically new method of construction in light and shade. Thus there is a technical break between the Tabitha and the frescoes on the back wall, which are in a more developed manner. We may assume an interruption in the work. Indeed we need not assume it, for records prove that for most of the year 1426 Masaccio was occupied with the great altar-piece for the Carmelites at Pisa. On October 15, 1426, Masaccio solemnly engaged not to do any other work until the altar-piece should be finished. We may believe then that the work in the Brancacci Chapel was taken up anew towards 1427.

The four frescoes on the back wall, which are divided into two groups by the window, are the first of the new work. Of these the most remarkable is St. Peter Baptizing, Figure 89. The drawing is magnificent. Light and dark, without aid of the line, create so many bosses and pits which not merely establish form but suggest the gravest emotions. A few well chosen and well placed figures give the sense of a multitude. Mountains tower in gigantic scale, one feels the run of the little river from its distant source amid high ravines. The simplest modulations of light and dark, so many sweeps of a broad brush, establish the constructional planes of the figures and the mountains. All the early Italian writers mark with wondering admiration the expressiveness of the shivering man waiting his turn at the left. It is the smallest merit of the picture. Masaccio in this great composition commands a homely and impressive majesty, and therein shows himself true successor of Giotto, but he also reveals a power of synthesis entirely modern and hardly excelled since his day. One has only to turn to Masolino’s Baptism at Castiglione d’Olona, Figure 82, with its niggling insistence on details, to appreciate the gulf between the master and the pupil.

Across the window from Masaccio’s Baptism is St. Peter Preaching. The same towering, mountain background is used. The somewhat linear treatment of the faces has led Mr. Berenson, with other critics, to ascribe this fresco to Masolino. It seems to me merely less strenuously seen, because the subject offers little inspiration. Masaccio has lent the theme real dignity, and, in the eager face of the nun at the front of the audience achieves an unusual sweetness. Technically there are good but not compelling reasons for supposing this fresco may have been done among the first, about 1425.

The lower scenes at the back of the Chapel are, at your right, St. Peter healing the Sick, by the mere fall of his shadow and, at the left, St. Peter giving Alms. In both cases we have Florentine street scenes with a classic air lent by the solemn figures of the apostles. We feel the figures as far or near, and the air that veils them. There is great intentness in the poor folk, and a rugged impersonality in St. Peter and St. James. They are not indulging personal compassion so much as fulfilling a divine mission. Again the combination of a drastic realism with a stylistic majesty is what makes these frescoes unique. They contain vivid portraits, among these the traditional portrait of Masolino, a gentle, heavy, middle-aged face, bearded, and crowned with a sort of tuque—just the man to have conceived the charming but loosely organized compositions at Castiglione d’Olona.

What Masaccio looked like we may see in the upper fresco on the right wall. He is the alert and determined figure impersonating St. Thomas, at the left of the group. The story of the Tribute Money, Figure 90, is one of the grandest creations of European art. If, as Leonardo da Vinci asserts, the highest task of painting is to show by the pose and gestures of the body the emotions of the soul, this is one of the greatest paintings. It is remarkable for the dignity lent to an apparently unpromising theme. The story is simply that Christ is required to pay the denarius when there is no money in the company. By a miracle Peter finds the coin in the mouth of a fish and pays it to the tax-gatherer. How the creative imagination has magnified this slender theme! Masaccio has formed a group of potent and formidable individuals, these simple men are fit to shake a world. He has shown them in a moment in which discouragement and determination blend. A technicality threatens to check the salvation of the world. He has discriminated between the assured authority of the Christ and the wrathful energy of St. Peter. He has invested the majestic forms with massive draperies grandly disposed in simple folds. He has given even the tax-gatherer the grace of a Roman athlete. Finally he has set the austere company before a noble river plain upon which press the slopes of lofty mountains, while the undulating crest of a remoter range almost bars off the sky. All objects, human and inanimate, bear firmly on the ground and are wrapped in an enveloping atmosphere. In the quality and arrangement of the figures, it all derives from Giotto; in the vastness of the scale, the introduction of mystery and distance, it is wholly Masaccio’s own. Vasari rightly praised the harmony and discretion with which these powerful assertions of form are made, and sees here the beginnings of the modern style of painting.