Masaccio

• 1. Introduction

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  Masaccio died in the summer of 1428, twenty-six years old and barely six years into his career as an independent painter. When word reached Filippo Brunelleschi, one of the most formidable architects in Florence, his response was simple: "We have suffered a great loss." That sentiment, from a man not given to understatement, points to something extraordinary. How could an artist with such a brief working life reshape an entire tradition? What exactly did Masaccio do that no one before him had managed? And why, centuries later, do the names Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael all trace a line of influence back to a young man from a small Tuscan town whose nickname meant "clumsy Tom"?

• 2. The Name and the Man

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  Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Simone was born on the 21st of December 1401 in Castel San Giovanni di Altura, a town now called San Giovanni Valdarno in the province of Arezzo, Tuscany. His father, Giovanni di Simone Cassai, was a notary; his mother, Jacopa di Martinozzo, was the daughter of an innkeeper from Barberino di Mugello, a few miles north of Florence. The family surname, Cassai, traces to the craft of Masaccio's paternal grandfather Simone and granduncle Lorenzo, who were carpenters and cabinet makers.

  His father died in 1406, when Masaccio was five years old. That same year his mother gave birth to a brother named Giovanni, who later became a painter himself, going by the nickname Lo Scheggia, meaning "the splinter." In 1412, Masaccio's mother married an elderly apothecary named Tedesco di maestro Feo. One of Tedesco's stepdaughters eventually married Mariotto di Cristofano, born in 1393, the only other documented painter from Castel San Giovanni.

  The nickname Masaccio is a comic enlargement of Maso, itself a shortening of Tommaso. In Italian, the suffix implies something ungainly or messy, so the name roughly means "clumsy Tom." It was coined partly to tell him apart from his principal collaborator, another painter also named Maso, who went by the opposite diminutive: Masolino, "little or delicate Tom."

• 3. Entering the Guild

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  No documents record where or how Masaccio learned to paint. Renaissance painters customarily began an apprenticeship with an established master around the age of twelve. Masaccio would have needed to move to Florence for that training, yet the historical record does not place him in the city until the 7th of January 1422, when he joined the painters guild, the Arte de' Medici e Speziali, signing in Latin as an independent master under the name "Masus S. Johannis Simonis pictor populi S. Nicholae de Florentia."

  That single document, a guild registration, is the starting point of what we know about his working life. He entered the record not as an apprentice but as a master in his own right, suggesting his training was already complete. Florence in the early 1420s was a city where Giotto's frescoes still commanded deep respect and where Brunelleschi had recently begun demonstrating the geometric principles of linear perspective. Masaccio absorbed both currents, and added something the city had not seen before.

• 4. First Paintings

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  The San Giovenale Triptych, dated 1422, is the earliest work securely attributed to Masaccio. It was discovered in 1961 in the church of San Giovenale at Cascia di Reggello, close to his hometown, and now lives in the Masaccio Museum of Sacred Art there. The central panel shows the Virgin and Child flanked by angels; the left panel carries Saints Bartholomew and Blaise; the right panel depicts Saints Juvenal and Anthony Abbot. The surface is badly abraded and much of the original framing has been lost, but even under that damage, Masaccio's interest in giving figures real volume and weight stands out clearly. Scholars see it as a revival of Giotto's approach rather than a continuation of what other painters were doing at the time.

  Around 1424 came the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, known in Italian as the Sant'Anna Metterza, now at the Uffizi in Florence. This was a collaboration with Masolino da Panicale, born around 1383 and already a recognized artist when the two worked together. The division of labor in the painting is unusually plain to see: Masolino is believed to have painted the figure of Saint Anne and the angels holding the cloth of honor behind her, while Masaccio took responsibility for the more prominent Virgin and Child on their throne. The contrast in approach is immediate. Masolino's figures are delicate and somewhat flat; Masaccio's are solid and have genuine heft. The older artist's touch is graceful, but it is the younger man's section that seems to occupy real space.

• 5. The Brancacci Chapel

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  In 1424, the wealthy and politically powerful Felice Brancacci commissioned the pair to decorate the Brancacci Chapel inside the church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence. Vasari described them at this point as the "duo preciso e noto," the "well and known duo." Painting likely began around 1425, with both artists probably working at the same time. The fresco cycle is built mainly around the life of Saint Peter, though two scenes placed on either side of the chapel threshold show a different subject entirely: the temptation and expulsion of Adam and Eve.

  Masaccio's contribution to the cycle shows, in a concentrated form, everything that set him apart. His Expulsion from the Garden of Eden depicts Adam and Eve driven out by a threatening angel. Adam presses both hands over his entire face to convey shame; Eve covers her breasts and groin. The raw emotional directness of those two figures went on to influence Michelangelo's own treatment of the same scene. In The Tribute Money, the shadows of all the figures fall away from the chapel window, as though the painted scene is actually lit by that real source of light. Scholars have long noted this detail as a deliberate stroke of verisimilitude.

  Masolino left the work in September 1425 to travel to Hungary; whether he departed over money, artistic disagreement, or simply a prior commitment is unknown. Masaccio himself put the chapel aside in 1426 to take on other commissions, and returned in 1427 to start the Resurrection of the Son of Theophilus before leaving that unfinished too. One later theory holds that the scene was deliberately damaged because it contained portraits of the Brancacci family, who had by then become enemies of the Medici. The chapel was finally completed in the 1480s by Filippino Lippi. A fire in 1771 destroyed some of the scenes that Masaccio and Masolino had finished; we know those lost works only through Vasari's descriptions.

• 6. The Pisa Altarpiece

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  On the 19th of February 1426, a man named Giuliano di Colino degli Scarsi da San Giusto commissioned Masaccio to paint a large altarpiece for his chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Pisa, paying him 80 florins. Masaccio probably executed most of the work in Pisa itself, traveling back and forth to Florence where the Brancacci Chapel still awaited him. Donatello was also in Pisa at this period, working on a monument for Cardinal Rinaldo Brancacci that was destined for Naples. Scholars suggest Masaccio drew early lessons about plasticity and the depiction of solid form from Donatello's sculpture, before he had fully absorbed Brunelleschi's more systematic, mathematical approach to perspective.

  The Pisa Altarpiece did not survive intact. It was broken apart and dispersed during the eighteenth century, and only eleven of what were originally around twenty panels have been tracked down in collections around the world. The central panel, showing the Madonna and Child, now belongs to the National Gallery in London. Though damaged, it still displays the sculptural quality Masaccio brought to his figures and the convincing sense of depth in his rendering of the Virgin's throne.

• 7. The Holy Trinity

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  Around 1427, Masaccio received a commission from the Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence to paint a Holy Trinity fresco. No contemporary documents name the patron, but records of a tomb at the base of the fresco have led researchers to the Berti family of the Santa Maria Novella quarter. The Berti were working-class Florentines with a documented devotion to the Trinity; they are thought to be the couple shown kneeling on either side of the sacred figures.

  The fresco is considered by many to be Masaccio's finest work. It holds a specific distinction in the history of Western art: it is the earliest surviving painting to deploy systematic linear perspective throughout the entire composition. To achieve the precise geometry, Masaccio drove a nail into the wall at the vanishing point beneath the base of the cross, then attached strings to it and pressed them into the fresh plaster to score the perspective lines. The marks of that preparatory process are still visible in the wall today.

  Below the sacred figures, a skeleton lies on a sarcophagus. Above it, an inscription reads: "Io fui gia quel che voi siete e quel ch'io sono voi anco sarete" - which translates as "I once was what now you are and what I am, you shall yet be." Scholars have interpreted the combination of the Trinity, death, and bodily decay as a visual transposition of the Golgotha chapel in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The Holy Spirit appears as a dove above Jesus. The fresco asks viewers to hold two thoughts at once: that human life ends in the skeleton below, and that faith in the Trinity is the answer to that mortality.

• 8. Legacy

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  Masaccio died at the end of 1428, most likely in Rome, where Masolino was at work frescoing a chapel with scenes from the life of Saint Catherine in the Basilica di San Clemente. A legend, unverified, says he was poisoned by a rival painter. Of the body of work he left behind, only four frescoes are beyond dispute as his; many other attributions remain partial or contested, and some works are believed destroyed.

  Vasari, writing in his Vite, listed the artists who made a point of studying the Brancacci Chapel frescoes: Leonardo da Vinci, Perugino, Michelangelo, Raphael, Andrea del Sarto, and others. Among the painters who worked in his immediate wake and tried to replicate his glowing, lifelike forms were the Florentine minor masters Andrea di Giusto and Giovanni dal Ponte. In 1817, the French painter Auguste Couder produced a work titled The Death of Masaccio, an acknowledgment that the painter's brief life had itself become a subject worth depicting.

  Vasari concluded his account with a thought that has echoed through five centuries of art history: that Masaccio, had he lived, would have produced far greater things still. He died at twenty-six. The nail hole he pressed into the wall of Santa Maria Novella to anchor his perspective strings is still there.