The organizing power of Masaccio is at its height in the Tribute Money. His emotional intensity is fully involved only in the Expulsion from Eden, Figure 91, the adjoining fresco in the nave of the church. Before the sword of a serenely inexorable angel, Adam and Eve stalk forth into the unknown. Their bodies cringe as they move, with shame and grief. An ominous light reduces their bodies to so many pits of shadow and bosses of light. Drawing of such accurate economy will only rarely reappear in the world, in Leonardo da Vinci, in Rembrandt, in Honoré Daumier. The desperate emotion is well contained within the oblong, in a monumental balance. Remorse in the two first sinners has its shades. The man’s head is pressed into his hands in an attempt at restraint, while Eve’s is thrown back in anguished ululation. The high emotional pressure is new, and symptomatic, and significantly it is contained within monumental bounds. The Italian Renaissance in its striving for expressiveness will rarely fail to keep expression noble. The ingrained classicism of the Florentine point of view is never more favorably represented than in a subject like this which seeks a maximum emotion on terms of order and lucidity.

What remains of Masaccio is in a sense anti-climax. Very stately is the fresco in this chapel, of the Resurrection of the Prince of Tyre and St. Peter enthroned. The beauty is that of fine arrangement and characterization. The graceful nude boy and about ten distinguished figures behind him were added to the composition, presumably from Masaccio’s designs, full fifty years later. They are the work of Filippino Lippi, who also added some portraits at the left of this fresco. He also filled the three unpainted panels, in an excellent imitation of Masaccio’s style. Evidently Masaccio was called rather abruptly to his last sojourn at Rome. For the fresco of the Raising of the Boy could have been finished in a fortnight.

I have omitted a fine fresco of a Pietà in the Collegiate Church at Empoli, though I believe it to be a splendid example of Masaccio’s early style, and I can only mention for its magnificent architectural setting in Brunellesco’s new style the fresco of the Trinity in Santa Maria Novella, Figure 92. It is of his latest manner and of extraordinary gravity and mass.

In 1428, being only twenty-six years old, Masaccio drops out of sight at Rome. Some report that he was poisoned, others that he was slain in a street brawl. We really know nothing about it. What we do know is that in the recorded history of art no painter had achieved so greatly in so short a time. Within six short years Masaccio created that method of painting which stood uncontested till the advent of luminism only forty years ago. And he not merely illustrated the method of construction in light and dark, painting in atmospheric values rather than in lines and charted areas, but he also expressed in the new technic both the noblest traditional emotions as also poignant new emotions quite his own. In one superb aggressive he had moved three generations into the future. For a hundred years the most intelligent and ambitious artists in Florence as a matter of course studied and copied in the Brancacci Chapel to form their style. Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Andrea del Sarto thus paid homage to the untidy youth from Castel San Giovanni, and even the iconoclasts of today, for whom Leonardo da Vinci and his peers are scarcely artists at all, envy the gravity and force of Masaccio. He is the real father of modern painting, which is most true to itself when it tempers an ardent curiosity as regards natural appearances with a respect for the great traditions of moderation and taste.

Masaccio’s successors, very wisely, did not closely imitate him. They saw he was an unsafe and unapproachable model. By a swift impulse of genius, and apparently without analytical study of anatomy and topography, he had mastered the broad effects that register form. Details he neglected. He gives the action of hands and feet, not their articulations, the scale of landscape and not its component parts. For men of lesser genius, these short-cuts were dangerous. While using Masaccio as inspiration, they had to verify his discoveries through analytical studies before those innovations could become generally available. The process of verification and minute research occupied about fifty years and may be said to be complete with the maturity of Leonardo da Vinci, say about the date of The Last Supper, 1498.

The successors of Masaccio may be divided into two groups as they quietly adopted and popularized the immediately available part of his discoveries, or strenuously carried his work forward. To the moderate progressive group belong Fra Filippo Lippi and Benozzo Gozzoli, and still later Ghirlandaio; the experimentalists are birds of quite a different feather.

These Florentine realists may be divided into two generations. The first asserts itself before the middle of the fifteenth century, and is trained chiefly under the influence of such sculptors as Donatello, Brunellesco and Ghiberti. These painters work at the problem of light and shade, anatomy, and perspective, accepting in their art the guidance of sculpture. The second generation of realists come to their own after the middle of the century, are mostly trained as silversmiths, and work at the new technic of oil painting, at landscape and at the figure in action. Both groups relatively neglected the important matter of composition. Most of the realists sacrificed pictorial effect the better to master detail, but they also accumulated that vast body of knowledge upon which rests the glory of the High Renaissance, and nobody can understand the progress of Florentine painting without following sympathetically their great effort.

Of the first generation, the quaintest figure is Paolo Uccello. Born in 1397, he soon gave himself fanatically to the study of the new science of perspective, especially to feats of foreshortening. His pictures are so many experiments and have a petrified inertness. Yet at his best he commands dignity and a considerable decorative power. About the year 1435 he painted for the Medici palace several battle scenes, three of which are respectively in the Louvre, Figure 93, National Gallery and Uffizi. The last, representing the Florentine victory of San Romano, shows the style. The forms are squared, in a fashion anticipating modern Cubism, in order to simplify the problem of placing and foreshortening. Corpses and lances are deliberately pointed at the spectator to offer so many problems in perspective. The landscape is minute and topographical. The decorative coloring is bold and original with interesting dissonances of oranges, russets, and greens. It is quite splendid after the unreal fashion of a tapestry.

Paolo’s masterpiece is the equestrian portrait of Sir John Hawkwood, Figure 94, the English soldier of fortune and occasional captain of the Florentine army, which is in the Cathedral. It is painted in gray-green touched with color, and simulates a tomb. The date is 1437. Since Roman times no equestrian monument of equal dignity had been created, and one is inclined to suspect that Uccello profited by preliminary studies of Donatello, his close friend, which later developed into the superb Gattamelata statue at Padua. Uccello has a lighter vein illustrated by furniture panels at Oxford, (a Hunt), at Paris, and Vienna, (St. George and the Dragon), but his most ambitious work is the decoration of the lunettes in the great cloister of Santa Maria Novella. The stories are drawn from the Old Testament, were started by Paolo, about the year 1446, and continued by several assistants. The medium was gray-green, terra verde, and the place accordingly is called the Green Cloister. Uccello’s manner may be best sensed in the fresco of the Deluge, in which the endeavor to set problems in perspective clashes unhappily with the desire to present a scene of terror. The figures are felt one at a time, there is little relation between them, and the picture has small merit apart from its probity in the rendering of details and a sort of abstract earnestness.

Uccello lived on till 1475, an indulged eccentric, ignored by the public and ridiculed by his greater friends. His zeal for perspective was unabated with age, and many a night his much-tried wife lost sleep as he murmured in the small hours—“O! thou dear perspective!”

Far the most powerful of these early realists is Andrea del Castagno.^[37] His aggressive and truculent forms savor of Donatello without Donatello’s fineness. He searches the secrets of anatomy, locates and describes the muscles and sinews, depicts a world ruled by force of arm. Although he builds in heavy shadows, after Masaccio’s fashion, he retains an outline that vibrates with nervous strength. His truthful sternness still wins approbation. He was born about 1390. We meet him first in full maturity, perhaps about the year 1435, as decorator of the Villa of the Pandolfini. To strengthen the ambition of that proud race, he painted in their great hall nine figures of heroes and heroines noted in war or in the arts. Recently transferred to the Convent of Sant’ Apollonia, which already had a Last Supper and a Calvary by Andrea, you may see the austere forms of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, of Esther, Queen Thomyris and the Cumean Sibyl, of the warrior Farinata degli Uberti, Niccolò Accaiuoli, and Filippo Scolari. This potent and melancholy figure of Pippo Spano, Figure 95, whom we already know as the patron of Masolino, at Buda, is the most striking representation that painting has given us of those masterful Italian soldiers of fortune who managed war and government for the less advanced nations. Pippo Spano had gone to Buda as a clerk and had quickly become a generalissimo, Obergespann of Temesvár. For King Sigismund of Hungary he stemmed the Turkish onslaught, did much to save Central Europe for Christianity. As he stands thoughtfully confident, holding the scimitar, the weapon of his foes, he is the beau ideal of that Italy soon to be immortalized by Machiavelli, in which virtue meant successful force, and both were on sale. A man’s portrait, Figure 96, in the collection of Mr. J. P. Morgan, New York, has an even more sinister intensity. Equally remarkable for its heroic aggressiveness in the young David adorning a tournament shield in the Widener Collection, Figure 70.

In the fresco of the Crucifixion, now in the Uffizi, Andrea reveals great knowledge linked to tragic expressiveness. No tenderness veils the appalling theme. An athlete suffers stoically while his mother and cousin shudder with grief. Of its ruthless kind it is a great masterpiece and quite unforgettable.

In 1456 Andrea painted for the Cathedral the equestrian portrait of the partisan leader, Niccolò da Tolentino, Figure 97. It is a companion piece to Uccello’s Hawkwood, and like it simulates statuary, in monochrome. It is more martial and restless, in the toss of the horse’s head and the snap of the rider’s cloak. It suggests not ceremonious dignity, but noise and impending action. It may very powerfully have influenced Verrocchio twenty years later when he modelled for Venice the Colleoni statue.

The truculence of Andrea’s manner led to a false and scandalous tradition, promulgated by Vasari, that he slew his rival Domenico Veneziano out of jealousy. As a matter of prosaic record, Domenico Veneziano survived his alleged assassin’s death, in 1457, by all of four years.

Domenico came down from Venice somewhere about 1438 and brought with him a new technical method. He finished the pictures, which he began in tempera, with veilings or glazes in an oil or varnish medium. He avoided the old frank Gothic coloring in favor of pale tonalities which oddly forecast our modern open-air school. The new method permitted of bolder brushwork and successive over paintings. For the moment it wrought havoc with the old conventional beauty, but it offered the painter new resources and refinements, and eventually made possible the triumphs of Leonardo and Titian.

On the whole, Domenico is merely the shadow of a great name, for we have only a handful of works by him, and those perhaps unrepresentative. The altar-piece of St. Lucy, in the Uffizi, Figure 98, is novel only in its acid and original dissonance of deep rose and pale green. The rugged St. John the Baptist shows an attempt to obtain force of modelling without exaggerating the shadows. This tendency persists in such disciples of Domenico as Baldovinetti and Piero della Francesca, and rules in Florence until Leonardo’s definitive application of Masaccio’s methods. In the profile portraiture of the period Domenico was a master, as shown in an admirable female portrait in Mrs. John L. Gardner’s collection, Figure 99. Many similar heads, which we can hardly ascribe to particular masters, seem to derive from Domenico. One of the most beautiful is in the Poldi Pezzoli Museum at Milan. All of Domenico’s pupils and imitators excel in a minute and topographical style of landscape of which he was probably the inventor. It may be studied in Piero della Francesca, in the Pollaiuoli, in Baldovinetti, and there is even a trace of it in the spacious Alpine background of the Mona Lisa.

Domenico died in 1461. By that time Florentine realism was emerging from its first phase, and was beginning to investigate with its new resources the facts of motion. It was the moment, too, when certain realists sought to regain the grace which had largely been sacrificed in the struggle for sheer knowledge.

Alesso Baldovinetti^[38] well represents this moment in a lovely Madonna in the Louvre, Figure 100, which shows in perfection the new topographical landscape and that juvenile graciousness which was to be the staple of the coming generation of artists. Baldovinetti was born in 1425, and this loveliest of all his pictures may represent him about the year 1460. He had been an assistant of Fra Angelico, but in a long career, he died in 1499, he fell behind the times. He taught Domenico Ghirlandaio his elements, and profoundly influenced Andrea Verrocchio and Antonio Pollaiuolo. Thus he keeps a sure if modest place in the progress of Florentine art.

In this chapter we have been dealing in a rough way with the Florence of Cosimo de’ Medici. Under his astute and delicate rule from behind the political scenes, Florence developed in wealth, splendor, and worldliness. The old piety was waning or assuming merely æsthetic forms. Greek studies were beginning to pave the way for an enlightened and sceptical humanism and, withal, a revival of the pagan sense of beauty. And when the new beauty came, it was gratefully mindful of those who had made it possible. Leonardo de Vinci lauds Masaccio. He expresses the immense debt that art owes to the first conscious realists. They did good and harm, but to Florence at least they opened the only way of progress. For whatever art may be elsewhere, in Florence it was fruitful only as it was intellectualized. Good theory, good practice—such was the creed imposed by the early realists and later formulated by their great scion, Leonardo. I do not offer it as a universal formula, but in these days when pure spontaneity—that is no theory—and false theory divide the field, the old Florentine credo is at least worthy of consideration by all who produce art and by all who love it. Baldovinetti was untouched by these new stirrings which are associated with the rule of Lorenzo de’ Medici, but he dimly forecasts the grace that was soon to come. This new spirit and its exponents must be the theme of our next chapter.

Vasari on Masaccio

Vasari’s general estimate of Masaccio’s importance is still sound.

“With regard to the good manner of painting, we are indebted above all to Masaccio, seeing that he, as one desirous of acquiring fame, perceived that painting is nothing but the counterfeiting of all the things of nature, vividly and simply, with drawing and with colours, even as she produced them for us.... This truth, I say, being recognized by Masaccio, brought it about that by means of continuous study he learned so much that he can be numbered among the first who cleared away, in a great measure, the hardness, the imperfections, and the difficulties of the art, and that he gave a beginning to beautiful attitudes, movements, liveliness, and vivacity, and to a certain relief truly characteristic and natural; which no painter up to his time had done.... And he painted his works with good unity and softness, harmonizing the flesh-colours of the heads and of the nudes with the colours of the draperies, which he delighted to make with few folds and simple, as they are in life and nature....

“For this reason that chapel has been frequented continually up to our own day [1554] by innumerable draughtsmen and masters; and there still are therein some heads so life-like and so beautiful, that it may truly be said that no master of that age approached so nearly as this man did to the moderns. His labours, therefore, deserve infinite praise, and above all because he gave form in his art to the beautiful manner of the times.”

Vasari then names twenty-five artists who studied Masaccio’s frescoes. From De Vere’s translation of the Lives, Vol. II, p. 189, 90.

Leonardo da Vinci on Masaccio

Leonardo da Vinci uses Masaccio as the example of a painter who goes to nature rather than to other men’s painting.

That Painting declines and deteriorates from age to age, when painters have no standard but painting already done.

“Hence the painter will produce pictures of small merit if he takes for his standard the pictures of others. But if he will study from natural objects he will bear good fruit; as was seen in the painters after the Romans who always imitated each other, and so their art declined from age to age. After these came Giotto the Florentine who—not content with imitating the works of Cimabue; his master—being born in the mountains and in a solitude inhabited only by goats and such beasts, and being guided by nature to his art, began by drawing on the rocks the movements of the goats of which he was keeper. And thus he began to draw all the animals which were to be found in the country, and in such wise that after much study he excelled not only all the masters of his time but all those of many bygone ages.”

“Afterwards this art declined again, because everyone imitated the pictures that were already done; thus it went on from century to century until Tomaso, of Florence, nicknamed Masaccio, showed by his perfect works how those who take for their standard any one but nature—the mistress of all masters—weary themselves in vain.”

But Leonardo approves also imitation of antiquity (Richter, Vol. II, ¶1445). “The imitation of antique things is better than that of modern things.” He would probably have sanctioned Masaccio’s devout study of Giotto. The warning is against slavish imitation of immediate predecessors.

Vasari on Paolo Uccello

The admirable and self sacrificing ardor of these first realists is best exemplified in the case of Paolo Uccello.

“For the sake of these investigations [in perspective] he kept himself in seclusion and almost a hermit, having little intercourse with anyone, and staying weeks and months in his house without shaving himself. And although those were difficult and beautiful problems, if he had spent that time in the study of figures, he would have brought them to absolute perfection; for even so he made them with passing good draughtsmanship. But, consuming his time in these researches, he remained throughout his whole life more poor than famous; wherefore the sculptor Donatello, who was very much his friend, said to him very often—when Paolo showed him Mazzocchi (facetted head-fillets) with pointed ornaments, and squares drawn in perspective from diverse aspects; spheres with seventy-two diamond-shaped facets, with wood-shavings wound round sticks on each facet; and other fantastic devices on which he spent and wasted his time—‘Ah, Paolo, this perspective of thine makes thee abandon the substance for the shadow; those are things that are only useful to men who work at the inlaying of wood, seeing that they fill their borders with chips and shavings, with spirals both round and square, and with other similar things.’”

Vasari, in Schele de Vere’s translation; Vol. II. p. 132, 3.

An Appraisal of Baldovinetti’s Frescoes

Here I may illustrate a common practice of the times in an appraisal of Baldovinetti’s frescoes in the choir of the Trinità by fellow artists including Benozzo Gozzoli, Cosimo Rosselli and Pietro Perugino.

“In the name of God—on the 19 of January 1496 (n. s. ’97)

We Benozzo di Lese, painter; and Piero di Cristofano da Castel della Pieve, painter; and Cosimo di Lorenzo Rosselli, painter, chosen by Alesso di Baldovinetti, painter, to see and judge and set a price on—empowered by a contract which said Alesso has with M. Bongianni de’Gianfigliazzi and his heirs—a chapel pictured in Santa Trinità of Florence—that is the choir of the said church, having seen, all together and agreeing, having examined all the costs of lime, azure, gold and all other colours, scaffolds and everything else, including his work, we judge from all this that the aforesaid Alesso should have one thousand broad gold florins.

“And for clearness and truth of the said judgment I Cosimo di Lorenzo aforesaid have made this writing with my own hand this aforesaid day, and so I judge; and here at the foot they will sign with their own hands that they are agreed with what is above written, and so judge.

Benozzo di Lese &c.

I Piero Perugino &c.

Translated from Herbert Horne’s edition of Alesso’s Ricordi in Burlington Magazine, Vol. II. (1903) p. 383.