arter 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. For all the artists came to study
and copy them: among others Michelangelo, whose nose was broken by
the turbulent Torrigiano, a fellow-student, under this very roof.

Tommaso di Ser Giovanni, or Masaccio, the son of a notary, was born
in 1402. His master is not known, but Tommaso Fini or Masolino,
born in 1383, is often named. Vasari states that as a youth Masaccio
helped Ghiberti with his first Baptistery doors; and if so, the fact
is significant. But all that is really known of his early life is
that he went to Rome to paint a chapel in S. Clemente. He returned,
apparently on hearing that his patron Giovanni de' Medici was in
power again. Another friend, Brunelleschi, having built the church
of S. Spirito in 1422, Masaccio began to work there in 1423, when he
was only twenty-one.

Masaccio's peculiar value in the history of painting is his early
combined power of applying the laws of perspective and representing
human beings "in the round". Giotto was the first and greatest
innovator in painting--the father of real painting; Masaccio was the
second. If from Giotto's influence a stream of vigour had flowed such
as flowed from Masaccio's, there would have been nothing special to
note about Masaccio at all. But the impulse which Giotto gave to art
died down; some one had to reinvigorate it, and that some one was
Masaccio. In his remarks on painting, Leonardo da Vinci sums up the
achievements of the two. They stood out, he says, from the others
of their time, by reason of their wish to go to life rather than to
pictures. Giotto went to life, his followers went to pictures; and
the result was a decline in art until Masaccio, who again went to life.

From the Carmine frescoes came the new painting. It is not that walls
henceforth were covered more beautifully or suitably than they had
been by Giotto's followers; probably less suitably very often; but
that religious symbolism without much relation to actual life gave
way to scenes which might credibly have occurred, where men, women
and saints walked and talked much as we do, in similar surroundings,
with backgrounds of cities that could be lived in and windows that
could open. It was this revolution that Mas