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5
2. Giotto as the father of modern painting.
UNIT II MASACCIO (1401-1427/29)
The break between what had gone before and the new 15th century creative art of Florence is
seen immediately in the Enthroned Madonna and Child by the short-lived Tommaso di Ser
Giovanni known to his contemporaries as Masaccio who was, after Giotto, the next great founder-
figure not only of Italian but of Western painting. This picture is a central panel of an altar-piece
painted by Masaccio when he was twenty-five. Its revolutionary heroic realism can be paralleled
only in the work of his friend, the sculptor Donatello, older than Masaccio but working in Florence
at the same time. In spite of the Gothic pointed arches used for the panels and the golden back-
ground this is a Renaissance picture. Masaccio's Madonna and Child are a simple, sculpted group,
as if blocked out from the same piece of stone, absorbed, archaic and unsmiling images. The throne
on which they sit and on which the large monumental Madonna casts a shadow is solid and three-
dimensional. The Child is realistically human and seriously divine. He takes grapes from his
Mother as a solemn foretaste of the Passion.
Masaccio's innovations are visible in the frescoes he painted about 1425 in the Chapel of the
Brancacci family in Florence. In his mid-twenties he revolutionised the art of painting. In the
principle scene in the series the Tribute Money Masaccio created a new sense of actual masses
existing in actual space. The subject recounts how when Christ and the Apostles arrived at
Capernaum, the Roman tax-gatherer came to collect tribute. Christ told Peter he would find the
tribute money in the mouth of a fish in the nearby Sea of Galilee. Peter cast for the fish, found the
coin, and paid the tax-gatherer. The artist has arranged the Apostle figures in a semicircle around
Christ, with the discovery of the money placed in the middle distance at the left and the payoff at
the right. The Apostles are enveloped in cloaks. This gives them the grandeur of sculpture and a
sense of existence in space. The Apostles' faces are painted with quick, soft strokes of the brush.
Masaccio has performed a miracle almost without the use of line. Form is achieved by the impact of
light on an object. In this picture Masaccio proved a simple maxim that 'Nothing is seen without
light'. Unlike Giotto who had attempted to take the observer only a few yards back into the picture,
where he immediately encountered the flat, blue wall, Masaccio leads the eye into the distance, over
the shore of Galilee, past half-dead trees to the range of far-off mountains, and eventually to the sky
with its floating clouds. And while Giotto'sought for the best means of telling the story selected as
the subject, Masaccio sought a fitting incident which as a theme, would enable him to depict the
characters he chose to represent.
On the narrow entrance wall to the chapel Masaccio painted his vision of the Expulsion from
Eden. In this fresco the clothed angel floats above, sword in one hand, the other hand points into a
desolate and treeless world. Adam's powerful body is shaking with sobs; he covers his face with his
hands in a paroxysm of guilt and grief. Eve covers her nakedness with her hands, but lifts up her
face in a scream of pain. Masaccio's drawing of the human figures and faces is masterly. Never
before the nude figures had been painted with such breadth and ease; and the man's separation from
God had never before been represented with such tragic intensity.
Masaccio made a great advance in both linear and aerial perspective; his figures were placed
firmly on different planes in the same composition. Masaccio's style was characterised by his
contemporaries as "pure, without ornament". By the fifteenth century the Brancacci Chapel had
become the place where young artists including Michelangelo, went to learn from Masaccio - the
basic principles of form, space, light, and shade of the Renaissance painting.
Make sure you know how to pronounce the following words:
Masaccio [
]; Renaissance [
]; Donatello [
]; Florence
[
]; Apostles [
]; Galilee [
]; Capernaum [
]; Milan
[
]; Eden [
]; archaic [
]; paroxysm [
]
NOTES
Tribute Money - "Чудо со статиром"("Подать")
Expvlsionfrom Eden - "Изгнание из Рая"