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There is a further tradition not very probable under the circumstances that Masaccio is buried, without name or stone, under the Brancacci Chapel.

As the boy grew up Ridolfo frequented those public schools of art before spoken of, the Brancacci Chapel, and the study of the cartoons in the Papal Hall. Here he secured the friendship not only of Granacci and Pier di Cosimo, but of Raphael himself, with whom he visited Fra Bartolommeo in his convent.

In the illustrious chapel of the Brancacci, before those frescoes, pale and resplendent as a divine dawn, he had talked to her of Masaccio, in language so vivid that it had seemed to her as if she had seen him, the adolescent master of the masters, his mouth half open, his eyes dark and blue, dying, enchanted. And she had liked these marvels of a morning more charming than a day.

If then we trace the development of Italian art, we shall first observe in such work as that of Masaccio in the Brancacci chapel at Florence just the same characteristic interest in the appearance and the varieties of human life as we find in the work of Boccaccio and Chaucer, and in the succession of the great Tuscan and Umbrian and Venetian painters and sculptors the same transformation of the bare reality of life by the magic of the imaginative sense of beauty and of passion as in the great drama.

The fourteenth century made very short work of the kings, allowing them a minimum of splendour; and those of the fifteenth century, who cared only for artistic improvement, copied slavishly, giving the kings their retinue only as they might have introduced any number of studio models or burgesses aspiring at portraits, after the fashion of the Brancacci and S. Maria Novella frescoes, where spectators of miracles make a point never to look at the miraculous proceedings.

From 1418 to 1436 he was back at Fiesole; in 1436 he was transferred to the Dominican convent of S. Marco in Florence, and in 1438 undertook to paint the altarpiece for the choir, followed by many other works; he may have studied about this time the renowned frescoes in the Brancacci chapel in the Florentine church of the Carmine and also the paintings of Orcagna.

This figure, being praised by the craftsmen, brought it about that he was commissioned to adorn the Chapel of the Brancacci, in the said church, with the stories of S. Peter; of which chapel, with great diligence, he brought a part to completion, as on the vaulting, where there are the four Evangelists, with Christ taking Andrew and Peter from the nets and then Peter weeping for the sin committed in denying Him, and next to that his preaching in order to convert the Gentiles.

He is not very badly off, I am sure, while this stands, and people come from all over the world to visit it," exclaimed Malcom, as they left the Brancacci Chapel, and walked slowly down the nave of the church. "Is this all he painted?" asked Barbara. "There is one other fresco in the cloister of this same church, but it is sadly injured indeed half obliterated," answered Mr. Sumner. "That is all.

After this, returning to the work of the Chapel of the Brancacci, and continuing the stories of S. Peter begun by Masolino, he finished a part of them namely, the story of the Chair, the healing of the sick, the raising of the dead, and the restoring of the cripples with his shadow as he was going to the Temple with S. John.

By Domenico Ghirlandajo, Accademia No work that we possess of the fourteenth century, save Giotto's, prepares us for the frescoes of Masolino: they must be sought in the Brancacci Chapel of the Carmine. But of the work of Masaccio his pupil, though his best work remains in the same place, there may be found here in the Accademia an early altarpiece of Madonna and Child with St.