**MASOLINO DA PANICALE - Frescoes in the Baptistery of Castiglione Olona**
A noble *Pietà* in the collegiate church at Empoli (datable between the end of 1424 and the beginning of 1425), under the influence of Masaccio’s genius, of whom Masolino may perhaps have been an occasional master in Florence and with whom, in any case, he was then collaborating in the pictorial decoration of the Brancacci Chapel. Perhaps in the very year 1423 or at the beginning of 1424, he alone decorated the lunettes of the vault of the Brancacci Chapel with the four *Evangelists* (lost in 1746 when the chapel was remodeled and V. Meucci painted *Blessed Simon Stock Receiving the Scapular of the Madonna*), which may have inspired Francesco d’Antonio in the organ shutters of Orsanmichele (1429), now in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence. In the two large lunettes on the side walls, Masolino painted the *Calling of Andrew and Peter*, of which an 18th-century copy was once in the Giovannielli collection in Venice, and the *Shipwreck of the Apostles*, derived from Giotto’s *Navicella* in St Peter’s in Rome, though with variations that probably survive in a fresco by Mezzastri and a collaborator in S. Maria in Campis in Foligno (after 1452). In the lunette at the back, beside the window (which was transformed into a window in 1746), Masolino painted *Peter Denying Christ*; but beside him Masaccio appears in the scene with *The Saint Who Raises the Dead*, demonstrating a collaboration that had already been established, with a secondary role for Masolino, in Masaccio’s panel in the Uffizi, *St Anne, the Madonna, the Child, and Five Angels*. In these early frescoes (destroyed in the 18th century and then replaced by the painted architectural ornaments by C. Sacconi), it may be presumed that a heightened sense of space and the concreteness of the lighting already alluded to the influence of Masaccio. Yet the distance between the two personalities is visible in the surviving frescoes of the chapel. Masolino’s *Temptation of the Progenitors* reveals his lingering attachment to late Gothic style: the figures are insubstantial, their flesh taut in a generic grace, lacking the individuality of those tragic and dynamic figures of the *Expulsion*, so full of ethos, painted by Masaccio on the opposite pilaster. Even the kneeling figures who attend the *Sermon of St Peter* in a mountainous landscape, in contrast to Masaccio’s *Baptism of the Neophytes*, lack individual character; they are marked by a pleasant superficiality clothed in fine colors, even if the towns and the Carmelites standing by emulate, without attaining it, the constructive power of his young companion. In the *Raising of Tabitha* and the *Miracle of the Cripple*, a grand composition typical of Masolino, divided by the figures of two elegant youths passing through a Florentine piazza, the distance from the “classical” structure of the *Tribute Money*, which faces it, is profound. It seems that Masaccio (v.) may have intervened in certain details, namely the cripple, the buildings, and three small figures in the background, while the weaker parts, marked by an external descriptiveness, belong to Masolino, who was also awkward in the disproportionate architecture that closes the scene on either side. The superficial but amiable and receptive painter from the Valdelsa region must have felt at home in the profane climate of the late International Gothic in Hungary. Before his departure, he must have painted, for the Carnesecchi altarpiece in S. Maria Maggiore, a triptych of which three substantial fragments have been rediscovered (a *Madonna* with a sturdy Child, once at Novoli, later stolen; a *St Julian* the knight, once in the pieve at Settimo, now in the Uffizi; and a *story* of the same saint in the Museum of Montauban). Nothing is known of Masolino’s activity in Hungary; yet after his return (c. 1427) he is found in Rome, when Masaccio also came there to fresco, for Cardinal Branda da Castiglione, a diplomat and humanist whom Masolino had met in Hungary, the chapel of St Catherine in S. Clemente. When work on this project began, perhaps to repeat their collaboration, Masolino may still have been alive, and echoes of his figurative style survive in the restored *Evangelists* and the *Doctors of the Church* that, paired, decorate the four panels flanking one of them; as do the other two compartments, recently rediscovered and acquired by the National Gallery in London. Masolino, having executed the *Annunciation* now in the Goldman collection in New York, whose perspectival structure develops that of the fresco in the church of S. Clemente, and the *Archangel Annunciate* and *Virgin Annunciate* in the National Gallery in Washington (Kress collection), left in Todi (1432) a most pure *Madonna and Milky Child* between two gentle angels in prayer, in the Franciscan church of S. Fortunato; then he crossed the Apennines to paint, in the service of Cardinal Branda, in his native village, elevated above the narrow but pleasant valley of the Olona (Varese). Masolino first decorated the six long lunettes of the vault (mistakenly supposed by some to date from c. 1423), then the entire baptistery (the date 1435 is repainted but correct). In the first (they represent, without following the order of the legend, the Annunciation, the Marriage, the Nativity of the Child, the Adoration of the Magi, the Assumption, the Coronation; on the walls, then, Paolo Schiavo, partly a pupil of Masolino, and Vecchietta displayed the Stories of St Stephen and St Lawrence), adapting to the shape of the lunettes, and perhaps also because of the late Gothic environment. Masolino reverted to elegant archaic forms, yet rich in Roman reminiscences and stylistic parallels with the paintings of the baptistery; thus showing firm modeling and mature experience that were also found in the most stylized and refined *Madonna of Humility*, once Contini Bonacossi, now in Germany. In the baptistery, whose façade preserves the remains of an ethereal Annunciation, Masolino frescoed the Evangelists in the lunettes of a vault and painted Prophets and Doctors of the Church on the intrados of the arch that divides the bipartite space. The rest, even the splays of the windows, the loquacious painter covered with Stories of the Baptist. And, in narrating with a plain, calm, and somewhat timid language, he finally expressed himself, evoking, as a receptive artist, the past, representing the Eternal City in a faithful and attentive view, showing in his poetic backgrounds (Baptism of Christ; Feast of Herod and Presentation of the Head of John to Herodias) a sensitivity to space in a blend of Gothic and Renaissance, yet remaining in the exaltation of color and in the slender, idealized figures of slight plastic consistency, always tied to tradition. Thus, in the three essential stages of his art—Florence, Rome, Castiglione Olona—while noting the outward aspects of life with his cheerful, oscillating language, enhanced first by proximity to Masaccio, through new influences and resonances, instead of progressing toward the new order, Masolino withdrew into the fascinating whirlpools of International Gothic. Belonging to the great Florentine stock, he could appear in Lombardy as a constructive and even plastic artist; in Venice he was understood in his most poetic quality: in the clear, tender, and luminous color that approaches Antonio Vivarini; in Florence he was merely a limited episode from which two lesser, essentially backward artists, Francesco d’Antonio and Paolo Schiavo, partly profited. — See pl. XXIII.