December 21, 2010 <Back to Index>
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Masaccio (born Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Simone; December 21, 1401 – autumn 1428), was the first great painter of the Quattrocento period of the Italian Renaissance. According to Vasari, Masaccio was the best painter of his generation because of his skill at recreating lifelike figures and movements as well as a convincing sense of three-dimensionality. The
name Masaccio is a humorous version of Maso (short for Tommaso),
meaning "big", "fat", "clumsy" or "messy" Tom. The name may have been
created to distinguish him from his principal collaborator, also called
Maso, who came to be known as Masolino ("little/delicate Tom"). Despite his brief career, he had a profound influence on other artists. He was one of the first to use Linear perspective in his painting, employing techniques such as vanishing point in art for the first time. He also moved away from the International Gothic style and elaborate ornamentation of artists like Gentile da Fabriano to a more naturalistic mode that employed perspective and chiaroscuro for greater realism. Masaccio was born to Giovanni di Simone Cassai and Jacopa di Martinozzo in Castel San Giovanni di Altura, now San Giovanni Valdarno (today part of the province of Arezzo, Tuscany). His father was a notary and his mother the daughter of an innkeeper of Barberino di Mugello, a town a few miles south of Florence.
His family name, Cassai, comes from the trade of his paternal
grandfather Simone and granduncle Lorenzo, who were carpenters -
cabinet makers ("casse", hence "cassai"). His father died in 1406, when
Tommaso was only five; in that year a brother was born, called Giovanni
(1406 - 1486) after the dead father. He also was to become a painter,
with the nickname of lo Scheggia meaning "the splinter." In 1412 Monna Jacopa married an elderly apothecary,
Tedesco di maestro Feo, who already had several daughters, one of whom
grew up to marry the only other documented painter from Castel San
Giovanni, Mariotto di Cristofano (1393 - 1457). There is no evidence for Masaccio's artistic education. Renaissance
painters traditionally began an apprenticeship with an established
master at about the age of 12; Masaccio would likely have had to move
to Florence to receive his training, but he was not documented in the
city until he joined the painters guild (the Arte de' Medici e
Speziali) as an independent master on January 7, 1422, signing as
"Masus S. Johannis Simonis pictor populi S. Nicholae de Florentia."
The first works attributed to Masaccio are the San Giovenale Triptych (1422) and the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (Sant' Anna Metterza) (c. 1424) at the Uffizi.
The
San Giovenale altarpiece was only discovered in 1961 in the church of
San Giovenale at Cascia di Reggello, which is very close to Masaccio's
hometown. It represents the Virgin and Child with angels in the central
panel, Sts. Bartholomew and Blaise on the left panel, and Sts. Juvenal
(i.e. San Giovenale) and Anthony Abbot in the right panel. The painting
has lost much of its original framing, and its surface is badly
abraded.
Nevertheless, Masaccio's concern to suggest three-dimensionality
through volumetric figures and foreshortened forms (a revival of
Giotto's approach, rather than a continuation of contemporary trends)
is already apparent.
The second work was perhaps Masaccio's first collaboration with the older and already renowned artist, Masolino da Panicale (1383/4 - c. 1436). The circumstances of the two artists' collaboration are unclear;
since Masolino was considerably older, it seems likely that he brought
Masaccio under his wing, but the division of hands in the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne is
so marked - Masolino is believed to have painted the figure of St. Anne
and the angels that hold the cloth of honor behind her, while Masaccio
painted the more important Virgin and Child on their throne - that it
is hard to see the older artist as the controlling figure in this
commission. Masolino's figures are delicate, graceful and somewhat flat, while Masaccio's are solid and hefty.
In Florence, Masaccio could study the works of Giotto and become friends with Brunelleschi and Donatello. According to Vasari, at their prompting in 1423 Masaccio travelled to Rome with Masolino: from that point he was freed of all Gothic and Byzantine influence, as may be seen in his altarpiece for the Carmelite Church in Pisa.
The traces of influences from ancient Roman and Greek art that are
present in some of Masaccio's works presumably originated from this
trip: they should also have been present in a lost Sagra, (today known through some drawings, including one by Michelangelo), a fresco commissioned for the consecration ceremony of the church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence (April 19, 1422). It was destroyed when the church's cloister was rebuilt at the end of the 16th century.
In
1424 the "duo preciso e noto" ("well and known duo") of Masaccio and
Masolino was commissioned by the powerful and rich Felice Brancacci to
execute a cycle of frescoes for the Brancacci Chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine in
Florence. Painting began around 1425 with the two artists probably
working simultaneously. For reasons that are unclear they left the
chapel unfinished, and it was completed by Filippino Lippi in the
1480s. The iconography of the fresco decoration is somewhat unusual;
while the majority of the frescoes represent the life of St. Peter, two
scenes, on either side of the threshold of the chapel space, depict the
temptation and expulsion of Adam and Eve. As a whole the frescoes
represent human sin and its redemption through the actions of Peter,
the first pope. The
style of Masaccio's scenes shows the influence of Giotto especially.
Figures are large, heavy, and solid; emotions are expressed through
faces and gestures; and there is a strong impression of naturalism
throughout the paintings. Unlike Giotto, however, Masaccio uses linear
and atmospheric perspective, directional light, and chiaroscuro, which
is the representation of form through light and color without outlines.
As a result his frescoes are even more convincingly lifelike than those
of his trecento predecessor. The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden depicts a distressed Adam and Eve,
chased from the garden by a threatening angel. Adam covers his face to
express his shame, while Eve's shame requires her to cover her body.
The fresco had a huge influence on Michelangelo. Another major work is The Tribute Money in which Jesus and
the Apostles are depicted as neo-classical archetypes. Scholars have
often noted that the shadows of the figures all fall away from the
chapel window, as if the figures are lit by it; this an added stroke of
verisimilitude and further tribute to Masaccio's innovative genius. In
the Resurrection of the Son of Theophilus he
painted a pavement in perspective, framed by large buildings to obtain
a depth of field and three-dimensional space in which the figures are
placed proportionate to their surroundings. In this he was a pioneer in
applying the newly discovered rules of perspective. On September 1425 Masolino left the work and went to Hungary.
It is not known if this was because of money quarrels with Felice or
even if there was an artistic divergence with Masaccio. It has also
been supposed that Masolino planned this trip from the very beginning,
and needed a close collaborator who could continue the work after his
departure. Some
of the scenes completed by the duo were lost in a fire in 1771; we know
about them only through Vasari's biography. The surviving parts were
extensively blackened by smoke, and the recent removal of marble slabs
covering two areas of the paintings has revealed the original
appearance of the work. Masaccio left the frescoes unfinished in
1426 in order to respond to other commissions, probably coming from the
same patron. However, it has also been suggested that the declining
finances of Felice Brancacci were insufficient to pay for any more
work, so the painter therefore sought work elsewhere.
Masaccio returned in 1427 to work again in the Carmine, beginning the Resurrection of the Son of Theophilus,
but apparently left it, too, unfinished, though it has also been
suggested that the painting was severely damaged later in the century
because it contained portraits of the Brancacci family, at that time
excoriated as enemies of the Medici. This painting was either restored or completed more than fifty years later by Filippino Lippi.
On
February 19, 1426 Masaccio was commissioned by Giuliano di Colino degli
Scarsi da San Giusto, for the sum of 80 florins, to paint a major
altarpiece, the Pisa Altarpiece, for his chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Pisa.
The work was dismantled and dispersed in the 18th century, and only
eleven of about twenty original panels have been rediscovered in
various collections around the world. The central panel of the altarpiece (The Madonna and Child) is now in the National Gallery, London.
Although it is very damaged, the work features a sculptural and human
Madonna as well as a convincing perspectival depiction of her throne.
Masaccio probably worked on it entirely in Pisa, shuttling back and
forth to Florence, where he was still working on the Brancacci Chapel.
In these years Donatello was also working in Pisa at a monument for Cardinal Rinaldo Brancacci, to be sent to Naples. It has been suggested that Masaccio's first ventures in plasticity and
perspective were based on Donatello's sculpture, before he could study Brunelleschi's more scientific approach to perspective. Around 1427 Masaccio won a prestigious commission to produce a Holy Trinity for the Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence. No contemporary documents record the patron of the fresco, but recently
references to ownership of a tomb at the foot of the fresco have been
found in the records of the Berti family of the Santa Maria Novella
Quarter of Florence; this working-class family expressed a
long-standing devotion to the Trinity, and may well have commissioned
Masaccio's painting. Probably
it is the male patron who is represented to the left of the Virgin in
the painting, while his wife is right of St. John the Evangelist. The
fresco, considered by many to be Masaccio's masterwork, is the earliest
surviving painting to use systematic linear perspective, possibly
devised by Masaccio with the assistance of Brunelleschi himself. The
sacred figures and the donors are represented above an image of a
skeleton lying on a sarcophagus. An inscription seemingly carved into
the wall above the skeleton reads: "IO FUI GIA QUEL CHE VOI SIETE E
QUEL CH'IO SONO VOI ANCO SARETE" (I once was what you are now; what I
am you shall be). This skeleton is at once a reference to Adam, whose
sin brought humans to death and a reminder to viewers that their time
on earth is transitory. It is only through faith in the Trinity, the
fresco suggests, that one overcomes this death. Masaccio produced two other works, a Nativity and an Annunciation, now lost, before leaving for Rome, where his companion Masolino was frescoing a chapel with scenes from the life of St. Catherine in the Basilica di San Clemente.
It has never been confirmed that Masaccio collaborated on that work,
even though it is possible that he contributed to Masolino's polyptych
for the altar of Santa Maria Maggiore with his panel portraying St. Jerome and St. John the Baptist, now in the National Gallery of London. Masaccio died at the end of 1428. According to a legend, he was poisoned by a jealous rival painter. Only
four frescoes undoubtedly from Masaccio's hand still exist today,
although many other works have been at least partially attributed to
him. Others are believed to have been destroyed.
Masaccio profoundly influenced the art of painting in the Renaissance.
According to Vasari, all Florentine painters studied his frescoes
extensively in order to "learn the precepts and rules for painting
well". He transformed the direction of Italian painting, moving it away
from the idealizations of Gothic art, and, for the first time,
presenting it as part of a more profound, natural, and humanist world. |