shness of their master, were learning what
was needful for the crowning and fulfilment of his labours on a loftier
stage.

Foremost among the pioneers of Renaissance-painting, towering above them
all by head and shoulders, like Saul among the tribes of Israel, stands
Masaccio.[163] 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. Clemente at Rome, though an earlier work, is
scarcely less remarkable as evidence that a new age had begun for art. In
his frescoes the qualities essential to the style of the Renaissance--what
Vasari calls the modern manner--appear precociously full-formed. Besides
life and nature they have dignity and breadth, the grand and heightened
manner of emancipated art. Masaccio is not inferior to Giotto in his power
of telling a story with simplicity; but he understands the value of
perspective for realising the circumstances of the scene depicted. His
august groups of the Apostles are surrounded by landscape tranquillising
to the sense and pleasant to the eye. Mountain-lines and distant horizons
lend space and largeness to his compositions, and the figures of his men
and women move freely in a world prepared for them. In Masaccio's
management of drapery we discern the influence of plastic art; without
concealing the limbs, which are always modelled with a freedom that
suggests the power of movement even in stationary attitudes, the
voluminous folds and broad masses of powerfully coloured raiment invest
his forms with a nobility unknown before in painting. His power of
representing the nude is not less remarkable. But what above all else
renders his style attractive is the sense of aerial space. For the first
time in art the forms of living persons are shown moving in a transparent
medium of light, graduated according to degrees of distance, and
harmonised by tones that indicate an atmospheric unity. In comparing
Masaccio with Giotto we must admit that, with so much gained, something
has been sacrificed. Giotto succeeded in presenting the idea, the feeling,
the pith of the event, and pierced at once to the very ground-root of
imagination. Masaccio thinks over-much, perhaps, of external form, and is
intent on air-effects and colouring. He realises the