coes, the St. Paul visiting St. Peter in Prison, below
on the left, part of the fresco next to it, the Liberation of St. Peter
opposite, and the St. Peter and St. Paul before Nero, and the
Crucifixion of St. Peter, below on the right, are the work of Filippino
Lippi.

Masolino da Panicale of Valdelsa was, according to Vasari, a pupil of
Lorenzo Ghiberti, and had been in his younger days a very good
goldsmith. He was the best among those who helped Ghiberti in the
labours of the doors of S. Giovanni, but when about nineteen years of
age he seems to have devoted himself to painting, forsaking the art of
the goldsmith, and placing himself under Gherardo della Starnina, the
first master of his day. He is said to have gone to Rome, and some works
of his in S. Clemente would seem to prove this story; but finding his
health suffer from the air of the Eternal City, he returned to Florence,
and began to paint here in the Church of S. Maria del Carmine, the
figure of S. Piero beside the "Chapel of the Crucifixion," which was
destroyed in the fire of 1771. This S. Piero, Vasari tells us, was
greatly commended by the painters of the time, and brought Masolino the
commission for painting the Chapel of the Brancacci family in the same
church. Among the rest mentioned by Vasari, he speaks of the Four
Evangelists on the roof here, which have now been ruined by
over-painting and restoration. A man of an admirable genius, his study
and fatigues, Vasari tells us, so weakened him that he was always
ailing, till he died at the age of thirty-seven. Yet in looking on his
work to-day, beside that of Masaccio, one thinks less, I fancy, of his
"study and fatigues," of his structure and technique, than of the
admirable beauty of his work. Consider then those splendid young men in
the Raising of Tabitha, who pass by almost unconcerned, though one has
turned his head to see; the sheer loveliness of Eve and Adam, really for
the first time born again here naked and unashamed; or the easy and
beautiful gesture of the angel, who bids them begone out of the gate of
Paradise. In Masaccio's work you will find a more splendid style, the
real majesty of the creator, a strangely sure generalisation and
expression; but in Masolino's work there still lingers something of the
mere beauty of Gentile da Fabriano, the particular personal loveliness
of things which you may know he has touched with a caress or seen always
with joy.

Masaccio was born at Castello S