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

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Masaccio

(Tommaso di Giovanni di Simone Guidi). Born Dec. 21, 1401, in Castel San Giovanni, Tuscany; died in the autumn of 1428 in Rome. Italian painter.

Masaccio, the most important representative of quattrocento Florentine painting, went beyond Gothic traditions and imparted to his religious scenes humanistic concepts glorifying man. From 1422 he lived and worked in Florence; he also worked in Pisa and Rome. Beginning in 1424 (?) he frequently collaborated with Masolino de Panicale. The problem of establishing which works are by Masolino and which are by Masaccio is one of the most difficult in contemporary art studies.

Masaccio’s earliest works, such as Madonna and Child and Saint Anne (in collaboration with Masolino, c. 1424, Uffizi Gallery, Florence) and the polyptych for Santa Maria del Carmine in Pisa (1426, portions in the London National Gallery and other museums), are marked by energetic chiaroscuro modeling, a sculptural, three-dimensional treatment of figures, and the expressive reduction of form. Between 1425 and 1428, Masaccio painted frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel in the Carmine in Florence. The frescoes that have been indisputably attributed to him include The Expulsion From the Garden of Eden, Healing of a Cripple, St. Peter Healing the Sick With His Shadow, and St. Peter Distributing Alms. Masaccio placed his figures in a spatially extended setting. He emphasized corporeality through simplification of drapery and expressive, restrained use of color. Thus, he drew his inspiration from Giotto and departed from medieval artistic devices. In the fresco Trinity (c. 1426-27, Santa Maria Novella, Florence), Masaccio, evidently influenced by Brunelleschi’s studies in perspective, introduced one-point perspective to wall painting. This method imparts to a composition a particular majesty yet, at the same time, maintains human scale. The bold austerity of Masaccio’s style greatly influenced the art of the Renaissance, particularly the work of Piero della Francesca and Michelangelo.

REFERENCES

Romanov, N. I. “Mazachcho.” Uch. zap. MGU, issue 126. Trudy kafedry obshchego iskusstvoznaniia, book 1. Moscow, 1947.
Mesnil, J. Masaccio et les debuts de la Renaissance. The Hague, 1927. Parronchi, A. Masaccio. Florence, 1966.
Berti, L. Masaccio. London-Philadelphia, 1967.

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References in periodicals archive

Masaccio. http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/masaccio (Accessed October 2014).

Linear perspective: a visual revolution

Longwell highlights Rockburne's interpretations of Masaccio's The Tribute Money (1425) in her Sepulcro (1976; Fig.

Dorothea Rockburne: In My Mind's Eye

Granted, it is difficult to argue on the basis of an absence of evidence, however, Casazza'a observation that a head of a Carmelite by Masaccio at the left of the scene was painted around by Lippi is surely correct.

Eckstein, Nicholas A., ed., The Brancacci Chapel: Form, Function and Setting: Acts of an International Conference, Florence, Villa I Tatti, June 6, 2003

Masaccio asked him to paint two angels for his fresco in the Carmine church in Florence.

The lesser known lights of Italian art

The picture I hope to conjure is of a class of seventeen undergraduates, energetically and imaginatively interpreting a painting such as Grunewald's Crucifixion, Gossaert's Deposition or Masaccio's Trinity, using information learned from art-historians, historians of religious life and theologians.

Religion and beauty in the classroom

Diane Cole Ahl, ed.: The Cambridge Companion to Masaccio (2002).

Bibliography of Italian studies in North America

Fragments of Masaccio's great altarpiece of 1426 are to be pieced back together in an exhibition to mark the 600th anniversary of the artist's birth.

Fragments of Masaccio's great altarpiece of 1426 are to be pieced back together in an exhibition to mark the 600th anniversary of the artist's birth

For example, in Caravaggio's 17th-century work "Sleeping Cupid," the subject clearly has rheumatic disease, while a 15th-century painting by Masaccio reveals a case of polio, the doctor said.

ART hotline

Yet the art world had to wait until the Renaissance artists of Tuscany introduced this elementary principle of realism in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, first in the work of Giotto (1266-1337) and then in a fuller form in that of the genial Masaccio.

The gems of Florence