This may not strike you all that much when you first think about it because our idea of God, our picture of God in our minds eye—as an old man with a beard—is very much based on Renaissance images of God. So, here Masaccio imagines God as a man. Not a force or a power, or something abstract, but as a man. A man who stands—his feet are foreshortened, and he weighs something and is capable of walking.
In medieval art, God was often represented by a hand, as though God was an abstract force or power in our lives—but here he seems so much like a flesh and blood man.
This is a good indication of Humanism in the Renaissance. In later painting we shall easily find greater science, greater craft, and greater perfection of detail, but greater reality, greater significance, I venture to say, never. Dust bitten and ruined though his Brancacci Chapel frescoes now are, I never see them without the strongest stimulation of my tactile consciousness.
I feel that I could touch every figure, that it would yield a definite resistance to my touch, that I should have to expend thus much effort to displace it, that I could walk around it. In short, I scarcely could realize it more, and in real life I should scarcely realize it so well, the attention of each of us being too apt to concentrate itself upon some dynamic quality, before we have at all begun to realize the full material significance of the person before us.
Then what strength to his young men, and what gravity and power to his old! How quickly a race like this would possess itself of the earth, and brook no rivals but the forces of nature! Whatever they do - simply because it is they - is impressive and important, and every movement, every gesture, is world changing. Compared with his figures, those in the same chapel by his precursor, Masolino, are childish, and those by his follower, Filippino, unconvincing and without significance, because without tactile values.
Even Michelangelo, where he comes in rivalry, has, for both reality and significance, to take a second place.
Michelangelo's figures are more correct, but far less tangible and less powerful; and while he represents nothing but a man warding off a blow dealt by a sword, and a woman cringing with ignoble fear, Masaccio's Adam and Eve stride away from Eden heart broken with shame and grief, hearing, perhaps, but not seeing, the angel hovering high overhead who directs their exiled footsteps.
Masaccio, then, like Giotto a century earlier - himself the Giotto of an artistically more propitious world - was, as an artist, a great master of the significant, and, as a painter, endowed to the highest degree with a sense of tactile values, and with a skill in rendering them.
In a career of but few years he gave to Florentine painting the direction it pursued to the end. In many ways he reminds us of the young Bellini. Who knows? Had he but lived as long, he might have laid the foundation for a painting not less delightful and far more profound than that of Venice. As it was, his frescoes at once became, and for as long as there were real artists among them remained, the training school of Florentine painters.
Along with a book he wrote in , North Italian Painters of the Renaissance, all of his early works were collected into one volume in , The Italian Painters of the Renaissance. As it was some time for the frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel in Santa Maria del Carmine, some work was in collaboration with Masolino. You must be logged in to post a comment. This is a site for information and analysis of the world of the Italian Renaissance.
Text is original to this site ItalianRenaissance. Product links above are affiliate links. David is one of Michelangelo's most-recognizable works, and has become one of the most recognizable statues in the entire world of art. Masaccio, Holy Trinity, , fresco. Profile of a City: Rome. The fresco is located along the middle of the basilica's left aisle.
Although the configuration of this space has changed since the artwork was created, there are clear indications that the fresco was aligned very precisely in relationship with the sight-lines and perspective arrangement of the room at the time; particularly a former entrance-way facing the painting; in order to enhance the tromp l'oeil effect.
There was also an altar, mounted as a shelf-ledge between the upper and lower sections of the fresco, further emphasizing the "reality" of the artifice. Not much is known about the details of the commission; no contemporaneous documents naming the altar-piece's patron s have been found.
The two donor portraits included in the fresco, one figure kneeling on either side of the archway, have not been positively identified. The persons depicted are almost certainly contemporary Florentines; either the persons who funded the work, or relatives or close associates.
According to the established conventions of such depictions, it is generally, but not universally, assumed that they were probably still alive at the time of the artwork's commissioning. Presumably, the representations in the painting serve as relatively accurate likenesses of their actual appearance at the time when their portraits were created.
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