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He realises the phenomenal truth with a largeness and a dignity peculiar to himself. But we ask whether he was capable of bringing close to our hearts the secret and the soul of spiritual things. Has not art beneath his touch become more scenic, losing thereby somewhat of dramatic poignancy? Born in 1402, Masaccio left Florence in 1429 for Rome, and was not heard of by his family again.
But what cares he so long as he has his paints and brushes? "Masaccio" would be a fitter name for him than Tommaso. So the name Masaccio, or Ugly Tom, came to be that by which the big awkward painter was known. But no one thinks of the unkind meaning of the nickname now, for Masaccio is honoured as one of the great names in the history of Art.
Sumner, knowing that the young people had been reading and talking of Ghirlandajo and Botticelli, said that perhaps there would be no better time for talking of these artists than the present. "With Masaccio," he continued, "we have begun a new period of Italian painting, the period of the Early Renaissance.
The Brancacci Chapel of the Carmine at Florence, painted in fresco almost entirely by his hand, was the school where all succeeding artists studied, and whence Raphael deigned to borrow the composition and the figures of a portion of his Cartoons. The "Legend of S. Catherine," painted by Masaccio in 8.
He summoned Leonardo, Andrea del Sarto, Rossi, Primaticcio, and founded the famous Fontainebleau school. Of necessity it was Italianate. It had no Giotto, Masaccio, Raphael behind it. Italian was the best art going; French appreciation was educated and keen; its choice between evolution and adoption was inevitable.
A soldier lifting his two-handed sword to strike off the Baptist's head is a vigorous figure full of Florentine realism. Also in the Baptism in Jordan we are reminded of Masaccio by an excellent group of bathers one man taking off his hose, another putting them on again, a third standing naked with his back turned, and a fourth shivering half-dressed with a look of curious sadness on his face.
It is crude, no doubt, but it is enough; the new art, which was to counterfeit and even extend nature, has really begun; the mystery and glory of painting are assured and the door opened for Botticelli. The three great names then in the evolution of Italian painting, a subject to which I return in chapter XXV, on the Carmine, are Cimabue, Giotto, Masaccio.
They will certainly be called great artists, just as Giotto and Masaccio are called great artists; they will be called the masters of a movement; but whether that movement is destined to be more than a movement, to be something as vast as the slope that lies between Cézanne and the masters of S. Vitale, is a matter of much less certainty than enthusiasts care to suppose.
This I can also say of painting and sculpture, wherein very rare works of the masters of that second age may still be seen to-day, such as those in the Carmine by Masaccio, who made a naked man shivering with cold, and lively and spirited figures in other pictures; but in general they did not attain to the perfection of the third, whereof we will speak at the proper time, it being necessary now to discourse of the second, whose craftsmen, to speak first of the sculptors, advanced so far beyond the manner of the first and improved it so greatly, that they left little to be done by the third.
The architecture perspective is scientifically accurate, and a frieze of boys with garlands on the villa is in the best manner of Florentine sculpture. On the mountain-side, diminished in scale, is a group of elders burying the body of St. John. These are massed together and robed in the style of Masaccio, and have his virile dignity of form and action.
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