Masaccio

Masaccio (1401-c. 1427), the first great painter of the Italian Renaissance, whose innovations in the use of scientific perspective inaugurated the modern era in painting.

Masaccio, originally named Tommaso Cassai, was born in San Giovanni Valdarno, near Florence, on December 21, 1401. He joined the Florentine painters' guild in 1422. His remarkably individual style owed little to other painters, except possibly the great 14th-century master Giotto. He was more strongly influenced by the architect Brunelleschi and the sculptor Donatello, both of whom were his contemporaries in Florence. From Brunelleschi he acquired a knowledge of mathematical proportion that was crucial to his revival of the principles of scientific perspective. From Donatello he imbibed a knowledge of Classical art that led him away from the prevailing Gothic style. He inaugurated a new naturalistic approach to painting that was concerned less with details and ornamentation than with simplicity and unity, less with flat surfaces than with the illusion of three dimensional space. Together with Brunelleschi and Donatello, he was a founder of Renaissance art.

Only four works unquestionably attributable to Masaccio survive, although various other paintings have been attributed in whole or in part to him. All his works, altarpieces or church frescoes, are religious in nature. The earliest, a panel, The Madonna with St Anne (c. 1423, Uffizi, Florence), shows the influence of Donatello in its realistic flesh textures and solidly rounded forms. In the fresco Trinity (c. 1425, Santa Maria Novella, Florence) full perspective is used for the first time in Western art. Masaccio's altarpiece for Santa Maria del Carmine, Pisa (1426), with its central panel of the Adoration of the Magi (now in the Staatliche Museen, Berlin), was a simple, unadorned version of a theme that was treated by other painters in a more decorative, ornamental manner. Another of Masaccio's great innovations—the use of light to define the human body and its draperies—is seen in the fresco series (c. 1427) for the Brancacci Chapel in Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence. In these frescoes, rather than bathing the scenes in flat uniform light, Masaccio painted them as if they were illuminated from a single source of light (the actual chapel window), thus creating a play of light and shadow (chiaroscuro) that gave them a natural, realistic quality unknown in the art of his day. Of these six fresco scenes, Tribute Money and The Expulsion from Paradise are considered his masterpieces.

Masaccio's work exerted a strong influence on the course of later Florentine art and particularly on the work of Michelangelo. He died in Rome in 1427 or 1428.