A history of Italian painting

by Frank Jewett Mather

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.

Fig. 82. Masolino. Baptism of Christ, detail of fresco.—Baptistery, Castiglione d’Olona.

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.

Fig. 83. Masolino. St. Catherine disputing with the Pagan Doctors. Fresco.—S. Clemente, Rome.