Masaccio

Masaccio (mäzät`chō), 1401–1428?, Italian painter. He is the foremost Italian painter of the Florentine Renaissance in the early 15th cent. Masaccio's original name was Tommaso Guidi. He was enrolled in the guild of St. Luke in 1424. Most of the creations of his brief lifetime have perished. Only four remain that are attributed to him without question: a polyptych (1426) painted for the Church of the Carmine, Pisa, many of its panels dispersed (now in London, Pisa, Naples, and Vienna) and some lost; the great Trinity fresco in Santa Maria Novella, Florence, which revolutionalized the understanding of perspective in painting; the Virgin with St. Anne (Uffizi), an early work in collaboration with the painter Masolino da Panicale; and his masterpiece—a major monument in the history of art—the frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel of Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence, begun by Masolino and completed many years later by Filippino Lippi. Leaving the chapel unfinished, Masaccio went to Rome, where he died. Masaccio's independent works in the chapel include Expulsion from Eden, Peter and John Healing the Sick, Peter and John Distributing Alms, Peter Baptizing, The Raising of the King's Son, and The Tribute Money. These frescoes had a great impact on Florentine painting and were for generations the training school and inspiration of painters, among them Michelangelo and Raphael. Masaccio imparted a new sense of grandeur and austerity to the human figure. He used light to give dimension to the contour and achieved a classic sense of proportion. At the same time he created a diversity of character within a unified group and emphasized the range of emotional expression in heroic individuals. Masaccio is remembered primarily for his innovative use of perspective. His originality and imagination place his work in the tradition of Giotto and Michelangelo.

Bibliography

See studies by L. Berti (1967) and B. Cole (1980).

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Masaccio

 orig. Tommaso di Giovanni di Simone Guidi

The Tribute Money, fresco by Masaccio, 1425; in the Brancacci Chapel, …

(credit: SCALA/Art Resource, New York)

(born Dec. 21, 1401, Castel San Giovanni, Duchy of Milan—died autumn 1428, Rome, Papal States) Italian painter. Little is known about him until 1422, when he entered the artists' guild in Florence. Giotto probably influenced his massive figures and spare composition, but the gestural and emotional expression in his rendering of the human body are closer in spirit to Donatello. In his most famous work, the frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel of Florence's Santa Maria del Carmine (c. 1425–28), painted in conjunction with his sometime partner, Masolino, his figures are constructed with strongly differentiated areas of light and dark that give them a three-dimensional effect. His Trinity fresco (c. 1427–28) in Florence's Santa Maria Novella is the first extant example of the systematic use of one-point perspective in a painting. He went to Rome in 1428 and died there so suddenly that some people suspected he had been poisoned. The rationality, realism, and humanity of the art he created in his brief six years of work inspired the major Florentine Renaissance painters of the mid-15th century and ultimately influenced the course of Western painting.

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Masaccio

original name Tommaso Guidi. 1401--28, Florentine painter. He was the first to apply to painting the laws of perspective discovered by Brunelleschi. His chief work is the frescoes in the Brancacci chapel in the church of Sta. Maria del Carmine, Florence