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Thus we shall participate in what has been, in what is, and in what shall be. You do not wish to be immortal, Monsieur Dechartre? Beware, for God may hear you." Dechartre replied: "It would be enough for me to live one moment more." And he said good-night, promising to return the next day to escort Madame Martin to the Brancacci chapel.
He in his turn was to create in the Brancacci Chapel of the Church of the Carmine at Florence a school of painters scarcely less renowned and powerful in its effects than that produced by the works in the Campo Santa.
He was first a goldsmith like Ghirlandajo, then afterward became a pupil of Fra Filippo Lippi, father of the Filippino Lippi who finished Masaccio's frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel. Botticelli wrought an immense service to painting by widening greatly the field of subjects hitherto assigned to it, which had been confined to Bible incidents.
In one of them is his celebrated naked, shivering youth, who is awaiting baptism, the study of which wrought a revolution in painting." A little afterward they were standing in the dim Brancacci Chapel of Santa Maria del Carmine, whose walls are covered with frescoes of scenes in the lives of Christ and His apostles.
The young artists whom the Magnificent gathered round him used to practise drawing in the Brancacci Chapel of the Carmine. There Masaccio and his followers bequeathed to us noble examples of the grand style upon the frescoed panels of the chapel walls.
The other great church in the Pitti quarter is the Carmine, and here we are on very sacred ground in art for it was here, as I have had occasion to say more than once in this book, that Masaccio painted those early frescoes which by their innovating boldness turned the Brancacci chapel into an Academy.
Twelve years before his death he commissioned Donatello and Michelozzo Michelozzi, who about that period were working together upon the monuments of Pope John XXIII. and Cardinal Brancacci, to erect his own tomb at the enormous cost of twenty-four thousand scudi. That thirst for immortality of fame, which inspired the humanists of the Renaissance, prompted Aragazzi to this princely expenditure.
Between his style in the Brancacci chapel and that of Raphael in the Vatican there seems to be but a narrow gap, which might perchance have been passed over by this man, if death had spared him. Masaccio can by no means be taken as a fair instance of the painters of his age.
And he portrayed therein an infinite number of citizens in mantles and hoods, who are following the procession, among whom he painted Filippo di Ser Brunellesco in wooden shoes, Donatello, Masolino da Panicale, who had been his master, Antonio Brancacci, who caused him to paint the chapel, Niccolò da Uzzano, Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici, and Bartolommeo Valori, who are all also portrayed by the hand of the same man in the house of Simon Corsi, a gentleman of Florence.
In this Carmine fresco are many portraits of Filippino's contemporaries, including Botticelli, just as in the scene of the consecration of the Carmine which Masaccio painted in the cloisters, but which has almost perished, he introduced Brancacci, his employer, Brunelleschi, Donatello, some of whose innovating work in stone he was doing in paint, Giovanni de' Medici and Masolino.
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