Masaccio
Masaccio
(b San Giovanni Val d’Arno, 21 Dec 1401; d Rome, before late June 1428).
Italian painter, florentine school. He is regarded as the founder of Italian Renaissance painting, a view established within a decade of his death. Vasari correctly perceived that Masaccio ‘always followed as best he could in the footsteps of Brunelleschi and Donatello, even though he worked in a different medium’. Among the painters of his time, he was the first to organize his compositions according to the system of linear perspective developed by Brunelleschi. He thus transposed into painting the mathematically proportioned spaces and Classical architectural vocabulary of Brunelleschi’s buildings, as well as the realistic anatomical structure, heavy draperies and human grandeur of Donatello’s statues. He was also inspired by the paintings of Giotto and the art of antiquity. Masaccio’s revival of Giotto’s monumentality and concentration on volume was, like the writings by humanists on Florentine history, an affirmation of the greatness and enduring values of the Florentine past.
St. Andrew
approx. 1426
J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu
