Masaccio, born Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Simone, was a Florentine artist who is regarded as the first great Italian painter of the Quattrocento period of the Italian Renaissance.
18 Facts About Masaccio
2.
The name Masaccio is a humorous version of Maso, meaning "clumsy" or "messy" Tom.
3.
Masaccio was one of the first to use linear perspective in his painting, employing techniques such as vanishing point in art for the first time.
4.
Masaccio moved away from the International Gothic style and elaborate ornamentation of artists like Gentile da Fabriano to a more naturalistic mode that employed perspective and chiaroscuro for greater realism.
5.
Masaccio died at the age of twenty-six and little is known about the exact circumstances of his death.
6.
Masaccio was born to Giovanni di Simone Cassai and Jacopa di Martinozzo in Castel San Giovanni di Altura, now San Giovanni Valdarno.
7.
Masaccio's father was a notary and his mother the daughter of an innkeeper of Barberino di Mugello, a town a few miles north of Florence.
8.
Masaccio's father died in 1406, when he was only five; later that same year a brother was born, named Giovanni after his father.
9.
Masolino is believed to have painted the figure of St Anne and the angels that hold the cloth of honor behind her, while Masaccio painted the more important Virgin and Child on their throne.
10.
Masolino's figures are delicate, graceful and somewhat flat, while Masaccio's are solid and hefty.
11.
Unlike Giotto Masaccio uses linear and atmospheric perspective, directional light, and chiaroscuro, which is the representation of form through light and color without outlines.
12.
Masaccio returned in 1427 to work again in the Carmine, beginning the Resurrection of the Son of Theophilus, but apparently left it, too, unfinished, although it has been suggested that the painting was severely damaged later in the century because it had contained portraits of the Brancacci family, at that time excoriated as enemies of the Medici.
13.
Masaccio probably worked on it entirely in Pisa, shuttling back and forth to Florence, where he was still working on the Brancacci Chapel.
14.
Around 1427 Masaccio won a prestigious commission to produce a Holy Trinity for the Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence.
15.
The fresco, considered by many to be Masaccio's masterwork, is the earliest surviving painting to use systematic linear perspective, possibly devised by Masaccio with the assistance of Brunelleschi.
16.
Masaccio produced two other works, a Nativity and an Annunciation, now lost, before leaving for Rome, where his companion Masolino was frescoing a chapel with scenes from the life of St Catherine in the Basilica di San Clemente.
17.
Masaccio profoundly influenced the art of painting and is considered to have begun the Early Italian Renaissance in painting.
18.
Masaccio's influence is particularly notable in the works of Florentine minor masters, such as Andrea di Giusto, Giovanni dal Ponte, and others who attempted to replicate his glowing, lifelike forms.