A history of Italian painting

by Frank Jewett Mather

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.

Fig. 87. Masaccio. The Temptation.—Brancacci Chapel.

Fig. 91. Masaccio. The Expulsion.—Brancacci Chapel.