right is St. Peter giving the money to the tax-collector. The figures are all admirably drawn, and painted with great breadth of treatment; that of the back view of the tax-collector is more especially a remarkable example of accurate drawing and of easy freedom in the pose and action. The same person, but in front view, represented in the right scene, has a similar freedom of pose and action, and there is an intensely gratified expression in his face as he receives the tribute money. The natural treatment of the hilly landscape of the background is also far in advance of the landscape-painting of Masaccio’s time.
On the altar wall there is another fresco by this painter, though now in a very bad state; the subject is “St. Peter baptizing,” where, among other figures, is the celebrated nude figure of a benumbed and shivering youth, a figure so well drawn, and so correct in anatomy, that, as Lanzi says, “it has made an epoch in the history of art.”
Another very fine and authentic work by Masaccio is the “Expulsion from Paradise,” painted on the left wall of the chapel, where Adam and Eve are represented as being driven from the gates of Eden by the angel with the flaming sword. The figures in this intensely dramatic composition have been borrowed, with little alteration, by Raffaelle, and used in one of the Loggia frescos, and he has also adapted some other figures from the paintings in this chapel for the cartoons, and in his frescos of the Stanze of the Vatican; and yet he, to whom so many others were indebted, was, as Vasari tells us, “little esteemed in life.” It was after his death that his real greatness was discovered; for do we not read that the great artists of Italy and other countries came to study the work of Masaccio in that veritable school of art, the Brancacci Chapel of the Carmelite Church, and it was only then that he was truly honoured? Filippino Lippi founded his style on the work of Masaccio, and Ghirlandajo, Verocchio, Leonardo, Perugino, Raffaelle, and Michael Angelo acknowledged his greatness and learned of him. This painter who was, like many other great men, so little esteemed in life, had, after his death, this epitaph written on him—
“I painted, and my picture was as life;
Spirit and movement to my forms I gave—
I gave them soul and being. He who taught
All others—Michael Angelo—I taught:
He deigned to learn of me....”
Photo. Brogi.
Plate 19.—Angels. Detail from The Paradise
Benozzo Gozzoli, Riccardi Palace, Florence