Chapter XXVII: Masaccio (tommaso Guidi)

(Pronounced Tome-mah'so Mah'sahch'cheeo)
_Florentine School_
1401-1428
_Pupil of Ghibertio, Donatello, and Brunellesco_

This artist, who lived and died within the century that witnessed the discovery of America, was famous for more than his painting. He was the original inventor who first learned and taught the mixing of colours with oils, thus making the peculiar "distemper" unnecessary.

The story of Italian artists includes a history of their names, for the Italians seem to have had most remarkable reasons for naming children. For example, this artist, Masaccio, was born on St. Thomas's day, hence, his name of Tommaso. Presently, for short, or for love, he was called Maso, and to cap all, being a careless lad, his friends added the derogatory "accio," and there we have the artist completely named. He owed nothing of this to his father, who was plain, or ornamentally, Ser Giovanni di Simone Guidi, of Castello San Giovanni, in the Valdamo.

As a very little boy, it was plain to be seen that slovenly Thomas was going to be a great artist, and no time was lost in putting him to work with the best of masters.

He was a veritable inventive genius. Until his time difficulties in drawing had been overcome mostly by ignoring them. Since no artist had been able to draw a foreshortened foot, it had been the fashion in art to paint people standing upon their tiptoes, to make it possible for an artist to paint the foot. The enterprising Thomas came along and he decided that feet must be painted both flat and crossed, on tiptoe or otherwise; in short he did not mean to lose by a foot.

He worked at this problem day and night, till at last the naturally poised foot came into existence for the artist. Never after Masaccio's time did an artist paint the foot stretched upon the toes. Moreover, until his time flesh had never been painted of a remotely natural colour, so Masaccio set about combining colours till he made one that had the tint of real flesh. Thus he was the first to overcome the difficulties of drawing and the first to discover a mixture that would not leave a glazed, hard, unnatural appearance and be likely to crack and destroy the finest effort of an artist.

He worked during his youth in Pisa, where the "leaning tower" stands; then he worked in Florence, finally in Rome, but those early pictures are long since gone. It was a century of adventure and discovery as well as of art, and with so much change, so many wars and rumours of wars, many great art works were lost. Besides, the horrible plague swept Italy east, west, north, and south. Who was to concern himself with saving works of art, when human life was going out wholesale all over the land?

Masaccio was certainly very poor most of his life. He lived with his mother and his brother Giovanni, an artist like himself, but not nearly so brilliant. Masaccio could not spend his life in painting but had to eke out the family fortunes by keeping a little shop near the old Badia, and being pestered day and night by his creditors he was forced again and again to go to the pawn shop.

Somewhere about 1422, careless Thomas painted his greatest picture which was doomed to destruction too early for us to know much about it; but it was named "San Paolo" and it was painted in the bell-room of the Church of the Carmine in Florence. The figure for his model was an illustrious personage, Bartoli d'Angiolini, who had held many honourable offices in Florence for many years. A critic and friend of artists tells us that the portrait was so great it lacked only the power of speech.

In this picture Masaccio made his first great triumph in the foreshortening of feet.

He undertook to celebrate the consecration Of the Church of the Carmine, and for this he made many frescoes, among which was a correct painting of the procession as it entered from the cloisters of the church. "Among the citizens who followed in its wake, portraits are introduced of Brunellesco, Donatello, Masolino, Felice Brancacci (the founder of the chapel) Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici, and others, including the porter of the convent with the key of the door in his hand."

This work was thought to be very wonderful because the figures grew smaller in the distance, thereby giving "perspective" for the first time. Imagine how crude a thing was painting in the day of careless Thomas.

That fresco is long since gone, but drawings of it still exist which tell us something of the people of Christopher Columbus's day--previous to their appearance, and their conditions.

After Masaccio had finished the procession he went back to his painting of the chapel and in the end covered three of its four walls with his works. Many of those paintings are scenes from the life of St. Peter, and several were worked at by other artists than Masaccio.

Masaccio was greater than Raphael, greater than Michael Angelo in so far as he pointed the way that they were to go, having solved for them all the problems that had kept artists from being great before him. Sir Joshua Reynolds says that "he appeared to be the first who discovered the path that leads to every excellence to which the art afterward arrived; and may therefore be justly considered one of the great fathers of modern art."

The artist lived but a little time, and was most likely poisoned. Nobody knows, but it is said that other painters were so wildly jealous of his original genius that they wished him out of the way, and his death was at least mysterious. He drew very rapidly and let the details go, caring only to represent motion and action. Because he painted so many portraits into his pictures there was great life and animation in them, and people said of him that he painted not only the body but the soul.

PLATE--ARTIST'S PORTRAIT [Footnote: Many artists have left us
portraits of themselves, painted, no doubt, with the aid of a
mirror, in a group or alone. This one of Masaccio in the Naples
Museum, shows him to have been a picturesque model.]

Some of his known pictures are the frescoes in the church of St. Clemente in Rome; the frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel in the Church of the Carmine, "St. Peter Baptising" and the "Madonna and Child, with St. Anne," which is in the Accademia at Florence.