A history of Italian painting

by Frank Jewett Mather

Fig. 89. Masaccio. St. Peter Baptizing.—Brancacci Chapel.

Fig. 92. Masaccio. The Trinity, Fresco.—Santa Maria Novella.

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.