MASACCIO, TOMMASO DI SER GIOVANNI DI SIMONE CASSAI, detto. - Painter, b. 21 Dec. 1401 at Castel S. Giovanni (S. Giovanni Valdarno [Arezzo]), d. in Rome in 1428. A painter who, having received the first rudiments of art as a boy in his native place, quickly oriented himself toward Florence, where Brunelleschi with his studies of perspective was suggesting a measured definition of space, the beginning of a new vision not only for architecture but also for sculpture and for painting.
And in Florence first Nanni di Banco, then Donatello were molding in statuary an energetic humanity concrete in body and in spirit. These precedents stand at the basis of M.'s formation. In a fresco in the Oratory of Montemarciano (Loro Ciuffenna) with the Madonna of the Milk between St. Michael and the Baptist, supposed to be from his beginnings, a certain moral tone must be joined to residues of Gothicism, that is, he adapts himself to an aesthetic climate that cannot be suppressed. But the panel of the Uffizi Gallery (central part of a lost triptych, formerly in the Florentine church of S. Ambrogio) with St. Anne, the Madonna, the Child and five angels (c. 1422-23), in which Masolino da Panicale collaborated - the amiable late-Gothic artist whose companion M. was in the frescoes of the Brancacci chapel (v. further on) and who was perhaps his occasional master - alludes in the arrangement of the figures, especially in the erect one of the Virgin of stony structure and in the athletic one of the Child with a physical force as if held back in the gesture of blessing, to a personal language substantiated by a sure drawing and a profound chiaroscuro, enlivened by a bold chromatism in the cry of contrasting dissonances; a leavening and luminous chiaroscuro of Romagnol origin that M. knew and strengthened, through Arcangelo di Cola da Camerino.
A vigorous transfiguration of the real into a violent peremptoriness of life M. expresses in the portrait: that of a Youth in the National Gallery of Washington, and that of a Man in his virility, in Boston in the Gardner Museum. Between the two paintings - which make one deplore the loss of a famous fresco described by Vasari, in the cloister of the Carmine in Florence, the Sagra, that is the consecration of the church (19 Apr. 1422) crowded with portraits of merchants, artists, eminent citizens - is inscribed a Madonna of Humility, also in the Gallery of Washington, where the geometric aspect of the head of the Virgin protected by a great halo in perspective and the Child, affectionate but ugly, assume the value of a polemic with the graceful tradition of the international Gothic, in order to insert themselves into the new order of the Renaissance that M. represents first in painting.
Wholly Renaissance does the artist appear in the already mentioned frescoes of the church of the Carmine, precisely of the Brancacci chapel, begun for Felice Brancacci, merchant and diplomat returned in 1423 from Egypt, in that same year or at the beginning of the following, by Masolino (v.) to whom was added, after he had painted the vault webs, the great M. The legend of St. Peter was to be illustrated on the walls, but the vault and the lunettes were lost in the eighteenth-century remaking (1746) even before a fire (29 Jan. 1771) devastated the temple and put in danger the very existence of the chapel. To the first three stories frescoed by Masolino, M. had added a fourth: The Saint in the act of raising the dead, of which perhaps there is a memory in two stunned figures attributed to the young Michelangelo, in a drawing of the Teyler Museum in Haarlem. Before considering, however, the solemn surviving frescoes of M., it should be remembered that he executed in 1426 (first payment, 26 Feb., last, 26 Dec.) a polyptych famous for the church of the Carmine of Pisa, commissioned from him by the notary Giuliano di Colino degli Scarsi, of which remain the Madonna and Child enthroned and four angels (London, National Gallery), the overlying Crucifixion (Naples, National Museum), a St. Paul (Pisa, Museum) and a St. Andrew at more than half-length (Vienna, Lanckoronski collection), four small Saints, formerly in the limiting pilasters, and the predella (Berlin, Museum), which, besides the Adoration of the Magi under the central compartment, represents the Beheading of the Baptist, the Crucifixion of St. Peter, St. Julian killing his parents, St. Nicholas dowering the three poor maidens. Missing are the four saints - to whom the mentioned episodes refer, and two saints who in the upper part flanked, with the two survivors, the Crucifixion. In this work M. painted, beginning with the Madonna and the Child, a severe humanity, defined plastically and illuminated according to a rational norm by the light that, unitary, comes from the left; a humanity akin to that of Donatello who already in relief had adhered to the Brunelleschian perspective rules of space limited and proportioned to the human figure. And it is plausible to suppose M. in contact with the great sculptor, precisely in 1426 in Pisa itself where the latter was, with mutually fruitful effects that with regard to M. are specified, besides in the defined spatiality, in the figurative enlargement decisively plastic in the story of the Magi and in those of the Apostle and of the Precursor of the step (the other two, weaker, belong to the workshop) and in the Crucifixion, here with a nuance of human characters from the massive immobile heroicized Christ to the dramatic Magdalene. To the surviving autograph frescoes of the Brancacci chapel M. attended from 1426 to c. 1428. First he had a part, helping Masolino, in the great composition of this master - who in the second half of 1425 went to Hungary - with the Healing of the lame man and the raising of Tabitha, on the right wall, that is, in the buildings of a Florentine square in the background of perspectival rigor and atmospheric value, in two seated little figures and one standing, where the leavening and luminous chiaroscuro of which mention was made returns. M. must moreover have given some drawing of the figure of the lame man, so praised for the foreshortening of the leg, for the chiaroscuro and the volume, by Vasari, which Masolino translated rather weakly. In the two orders of the stories under the lunettes (which is what remains of the fifteenth-century decoration) there belongs then to M. the idea of the architectural partitioning with fluted Corinthian pilasters, which scan the stories themselves with clear Brunelleschian elegance.
Beside the mentioned composition, on the end wall M. painted the Baptism of the neophytes, to which corresponds the Sermon of St. Peter by Masolino. There follows on the left wall the Tribute and, on the entrance pilaster, the Expulsion of the first parents, by M.; while on the opposite pilaster his companion had carried out Adam and Eve tempted. In the lower order still on the end wall M. returns, to execute there the Distribution of alms and the Death of Ananias, St. Peter healing the sick with his own shadow, finally under the Tribute the St. Peter in cathedra and The resurrection of the son of Theophilus prefect of Antioch. This episode, left unfinished by M. and completed more than fifty years later by Filippino Lippi, must be connected with another moment of the legend of the Apostle frescoed on the pier beneath the Expulsion: St. Peter in prison visited by St. Paul, also completed by Lippi (v.), to whom belong on the right wall St. Peter freed from prison, the Dispute with Simon Magus and the Crucifixion of the Saint. M.'s paintings, executed in the order indicated, all obey one law (which, albeit with less concreteness, through his influence also governs those of Masolino and governed those, likewise on the walls, that have been lost), namely rationality in the distribution of light proceeding from an actual source: the large window in the middle of the end wall, replaced (1746) by the present graceless window. Hence the individual scenes, according to their location, are more or less illuminated and have their own more or less intense chromatic emergence and vibration. It was precisely color that must originally have stood out most vividly, as can be seen in the two assistants at the Baptism, already partly covered by the marble framing of the eighteenth-century altar. In this scene the triangular space of a narrow little valley receives the neophytes, substantiated by a soft chiaroscuro that is not monochrome but colored, from which stand out the garment of St. Peter (the head was redone by Filippino Lippi) and the kneeling baptizand, not through outlines but in their mass by means of tones, with the exaltation first of all of plasticism, then of color.
The strongest light intervenes to define with statuary power the figures of the Tribute (Mt. 17), a mature expression of M.'s genius, divided into three moments (Christ ordering Peter to fish in the lake of Gennesaret for the fish in which he will find the two drachmas to enter Capernaum; Peter fishing against the background of a mountainous valley that widens and is punctuated by a tree; Peter paying the tax collector); moments of which the first, preeminent and classically measured in the balanced arrangement of the severe landscape around the noble, idealized Jesus and the Apostles, defined in their characters by human nuances that culminate in the features of the obtuse tax collector, of an unheard-of plasticity. And it was precisely for its composition and its plasticism that this was the painting most admired by the Florentines of the Renaissance. In the Expulsion the general tonality is rather muted, yet the light strikes the first parents violently with a meaning both tragic and symbolic, at the moment when they take possession of the world. And to the emotionality of Eve, derived from a Praxitelean Venus Pudica — but devoid of all sensuality — corresponds the recollection of Adam, slumped down.
In the lower register a broad chromatic cheerfulness presents the Distribution of Alms, in a hilly village suited to that elementary rural humanity, physically and morally healthy, seen in compositions from below upward full of anticipations; as the figures of two lost frescoes must have been: a St. Paul in the Carmine and a St. Ivo in the Badia Fiorentina. In certain touches in the landscape, worthy of a modern, and in certain painterly passages, in the figures worthy of a Venetian, here surface the prodigious novelties of M.'s painting.
The miseries within the narrow confines of a dark street of artisan Florence are then synthetically presented in the scene where Peter, dreamy and idealized, heals the sick, now of reserved certainty in their faith, now of animal obtuseness; and certain aspects are placed in greater relief because they stand against those gray architectures of a lowered tonality.
In the last great composition the architectural scheme, with the polychrome enclosure and the two projecting wings, recalls Giotto's fresco in S. Croce with the Death and Funeral of St. Francis, though with movement and depth (in the buildings on the left and in the background garden touched by courtly refinement) that intensify the space. Wealthy bourgeois and a few witty commoners, akin to Donatello's expressive prophets, crowd together before Theophilus, constructed with a chromatic impasto of softened matter concluded in the individual masses by means of frank notes; more energetically strengthened in St. Peter, firm as a pillar, and in the sharp foreshortening of the head of the kneeling St. Paul. The youth, however, whom the legend says was resurrected after fully fourteen years (Acts of the Apostles), has lost his native vitality in the soft completion by Lippi, who according to Vasari would have portrayed there the painter Fr. Granacci as an adolescent. And he lacks the luminous substance of M., which likewise disappears in the eight figures that follow, in which one would like to recognize figures executed by Filippino; as was the group of five figures behind Theophilus (among them is Pulci), except perhaps for a young Florentine and a Carmelite who preserve something of Masaccio.
The great artist returns in his full genuineness on the right, on the primordial cathedra improvised in the praetorium. St. Peter sits enraptured and praying, forming with the kneeling devotees a plastic pyramidal construction closed by the two standing groups. The soft fusion of chiaroscuro and color does not diminish the dense volume of those Carmelites and those bourgeois, whose physique is articulated with human clarity, distinguishing itself from Giotto's analogous compositions in the suitors of the Virgin, frozen in prayer in the Padua cycle. Among the laymen on the right, in a still young man, in three-quarter view turned toward the observer, one seems bound to recognize M.'s self-portrait, in place of the figure in profile who, wrapped in a red cloak, looms large in the Tribute, perhaps the patron Felice Brancacci. Before leaving the Carmine cycle unfinished to go to Rome, the artist must have marked on the adjacent pier the trace of another composition: the Visit of Paul to Peter in Prison; a composition of extreme economy in the prison crenellated like a tower, where the sad head of the prisoner is entirely in Lippi's psychologism, but the rigorous three-quarter view of the Apostle of Tarsus betrays its Masacciesque ancestry (through a drawing, a cartoon or a sinopia?) that Filippino cannot conceal.
Before his departure from Florence M. painted two Deschi da parto. One with a "skirmish," which was formerly in the Medici collection, was lost, along with other works cited by the sources; the other, with the homage to a woman in childbed and on the back a putto playing with a weasel — a work in which the artist's workshop had a part — is in the Berlin Museum and tends toward the illustrative. He executed above all in S. Maria Novella the great fresco with the Trinity (once at mid-church on the left wall, later transferred to the facade wall) within an architecture so Renaissance in character that it was believed by some to be by Brunelleschi himself. M., however, set out in the wake of the great initiator to achieve an architectural definition of the setting in relation to the figures, without a unitary convergence of the perspectival lines of the one and the other; so that, with an illusionistic effect, the powerful group might emerge in the foreground planes. The frontal Eternal Father and the idealized Christ, like that of the Tribute, must be joined to the mystery of the Crucifixion (flanked by the austere Mourning Virgin and the monumental St. John), in which the drama is as it were repressed in the static contemplation to which the donors also join — in the Nativity — of the same stature as the divinity, but with a physiognomy of their own in the one, a fine profile of the man, and in the good-natured one of his vulgar peasant companion. Enlivened by color, in some places extremely vivid, the painting that concludes M.'s oeuvre suggests, in the illusionistic relationship between setting and figures, subsequent developments in painting, especially decorative painting.
In Rome there are echoes of M. in the frescoes of the chapel of St. Catherine in S. Clemente (v. MASOLINO), not his personal participation; among the works attributed to him, a small panel with the Miracle of the Possessed Man in the Johnson collection in Philadelphia should be returned to his very modest collaborator Andrea di Giusto (influenced by Gentile da Fabriano and later by Angelico). In M. an intense physical and spiritual life is realized in the concreteness of a space limited and proportioned to man as lord of the world, through chiaroscuro and light with prevailing aims of plasticism, to which are sometimes added remarkable anticipations of a painterly order. His genius developed straight and coherent within a brief span of time, and does not permit attributing to him, as a certain criticism, especially beyond the Alps, still does, works of uncertain character, or outright late-Gothic ones due to Masolino, with whom he is even confused in the Brancacci Chapel. The artist is an expression of Florentine civilization; his world of real men coincides with that envisioned by the early Tuscan humanism that precedes him; and he takes his place, together with the other two agents in the contiguous fields — Brunelleschi and Donatello — as the founder of the painting of the new order of the Renaissance, which arose in the early fifteenth century in Florence. M., having died too young, had no pupils; rather, on the solemn histories of the Brancacci Chapel, the beginning of the Renaissance, many meditated and learned, down to Michelangelo and Raphael. His painting, moreover, beyond any historicization, is among the major events of the figurative civilization of every age. - See plates XXI-XXII.
Bibliography6 works
Mario Salmi