Masaccio: St Peter (The Brancacci Chapel)

The historic centre of the city, with its 48 churches inside the ‘ancient circle’ of the walls, was now surrounded by the Franciscans in Santa Croce to the East, the Dominicans in Santa Maria Novella to the West, and the Carmelites in Santa Maria del Carmine on the other side of the Arno, in a church, which, in the view of Florence in the 1470s that we saw in the previous lecture, looked like this:

In this lecture I shall be concerned with the Carmelite church in Florence (begun in Dante’s lifetime and built in the Gothic style, but not completed and consecrated until 1422), with the Carmelite convent at Pisa (the two White Friars I showed you earlier were part of an altar piece done for here in 1426), and with their very shrewd choice, in the mid-1420s, of an artist for both places.

The Carmelites chose well, and they chose early, because the young man, who was born further up the Arno valley in 1401, died at the age of 27 in the year 1428.

His name was ‘Thomas John Simonson’, Tommaso Giovanni di Mone; but he was always called Tom, or Tompkins—in Tuscan, Masaccio. I do not need to add much to what I have already said about the social history of Florence in the late fourteenth century and the early years of the fifteenth, but I ought perhaps to remind you that despite a fall in population from around 100,000 in 1300 to about 45,000 in 1400, mainly as a result of the Black Death, it was still a self-governing Republic, and it defended itself against its neighbours in three major wars in the first three decades of the new century.

I show you here two images of the nave of San Lorenzo to illustrate his creative rediscovery—based on a prolonged, first-hand study of Roman buildings—of both the ‘grammar’ or ‘geometry’ of Classical architecture (clearly evident in the round arches and the proportions of the columns), and also of the ‘idiom’ of Classical architecture, which is easy to see in his loving imitation of the three-part entablature (architrave, frieze, cornice) supported by a capital which has the volutes and the acanthus leaves of the Composite Order.

The 1410s and 1420s were also immensely important years for sculpture, with several great artists at work at Orsanmichele in the centre of Florence, busy on the statues of the saints which were to stand in the niches on all four sides.

The greatest sculptor among them was Donatello, from whose work I have chosen a statue of St Mark (1413, fig. 10) and a heroic statue of St George (1417, fig. 11). Focus for a moment on St. George—so alert and so sensitive—because it is this statue, more than any other, which has come to symbolise the renewed admiration for the Classical past, and the new understanding and imitation of all aspects of that past, which characterise literature and philosophy, as well as the visual arts in the new century.

Brunelleschi and Donatello were friends, and it seems to have been these two—the architect and the sculptor—who made the decisive breakthrough in the study of perspective, a breakthrough which would be theorised and popularised in the mid-1430s by Leo Battista Alberti in his treatise on painting.

The breakthrough consisted essentially in four linked factors. First, the edges of the panel or picture were treated as a window frame, and the surface of the picture was treated as though it were the glass in the window, on which one had, so to speak, ‘traced’ the objects that one could see through and beyond the window. The second innovation was to establish a single, fixed, viewing point with respect to the window: the eye had to remain stationary, fixed in all three coordinates, that is, so many arm lengths back from the surface, so many arms in from the left, and so many arms up from the bottom (all Florentine measurements were in ‘arms’, rather than ‘feet’).

This fixing of the “point of view” permitted the third development, the definition of a single ‘vanishing point’ set on the horizon, to which all the ‘orthogonals’—that is, all lines which are in reality parallel to the line of sight—would seem to converge. The fourth and last feature of the new system of perspective was the use of a common scale for every object in the picture, with the result that the buildings now had to become big enough to contain the human beings, and that the people in the picture would differ in size, not in proportion to their importance (as so often happens in medieval paintings), but in strict accordance with their presumed distance from the picture plane.

With this bare minimum of context, we can usefully spend a moment or two to ‘get our eye in’ by looking briefly at Masaccio’s first commission for the Carmelites, a now dismembered altar piece for Pisa, of which the centre panel happens to be in our own National Gallery. It illustrates what Masaccio had been taught as an apprentice; what he had absorbed from Donatello’s sculpture and Brunelleschi’s buildings and perspective; and also what he himself brought by way of genius and the observation of directional light. I show it alongside a very famous altar piece by Giotto, done a hundred years earlier, and now in the Uffizi, so that we can pick up both the debt to tradition and the innovations.

In both, you see a non-rectangular frame with a gold ground, showing steps leading up to a throne on which Mary sits, her face in three-quarter profile, a mantle over her right shoulder and head, with Jesus on her left knee. On the steps there are two angels with flat, unforeshortened halos; and Mary also has a flat, but richly-tooled halo.

Giotto’s throne is clearly Gothic in its pointed arches and pinnacles, and the steps are inlaid with a typical Cosmatesque pattern of the kind I showed you in Assisi in the previous lecture. Masaccio’s throne, by contrast, is self-consciously classical, apparently carved from a severe grey stone (‘pietra serena’), with two orders of Classical columns (single below, double above), proper entablatures, and with classically inspired rosettes on the base and classical decorations on the step.

Giotto’s perspective certainly ‘creates space’—there is ‘room’ for these angels to kneel, and room for the Madonna—but the implied viewing point is far higher for the steps than it is for the underside of the arch, and the arch is not seen centrally, even though the wings of the throne are symmetrical and ‘fully frontal’. Masaccio, by contrast, has placed his viewing height, and therefore his horizon, rather low, making it coincide with the level of the spectator’s eye in the chapel. The top of the lowest [FIXME: CHECK] step is just revealed; the next step is seen almost flat; the seat and the base of the lower column, and all the rest of the throne, are foreshortened consistently from below.

Passing on to the figures, look first at the Christ child in Giotto, who is clothed, flat-haloed, distinctly ‘volumetric’—but not particularly convincing anatomically. In Masaccio, he is naked, the halo is foreshortened, the body strongly sculpturesque; and he recalls a classical ‘infant Hercules’. Now, look at the foreground angels: in Giotto, they are kneeling, in profile, almost mirror images of each other, modelled in light and dark tones in more or less the same way, although one is on the left and the other is on the right.

The fresco cycle on which the rest of this lecture will focus, located on the South side of the church, occupies all three walls in the surviving chapel. Since the photograph on the left in fig. 17 was taken, it has become dazzlingly bright again, after a recent restoration.

However, the whole story of the cycle in the chapel actually begins with a kind of prologue from the Old Testament, found in the upper pair on the entry arch, pictured in fig. 23 their uncleaned state:

The frescos face each other, and measure about seven feet by nearly three feet. In all their collaborations, the two ‘Toms’ never made a happier division of the work, and this arch is undoubtedly the best place to study the differences between the smooth, graceful style of Masolino in the Temptation, and the intensely dramatic art of Masaccio in the Expulsion.

Had they switched subjects, the result might have been disastrous. Masolino’s Eve glances sideways at Adam, coolly but not uninvitingly, twining her left arm around the tree in imitation of the serpent, whose alluring face and long hair could be interpreted as the expression of Eve’s inner self. Her gesture reveals her small, high breasts, and her rather northern proportions. Her legs are almost fused together, like the Ghiberti bronzes we shall examine in the next lecture. Adam stands equally motionless, his face relatively inscrutable.

Masaccio’s pair—shown in fig. 25 (left) clean and without their fig leaves after the restoration—seem to stumble out through the narrow gate of Paradise, driven by the fiery cherub with his sword. Closing in (fig. 25, right), we see Adam’s massive shoulders hunched as he buries his face in his hands, while Eve throws her head back, using her hands to cover her breast and her sex. Her face is torn by one dark patch for her mouth, and two diagonal slashes, standing for her eyes; and a great deal of the visual impact depends on the very exciting brushwork.

Masolino seems to draw a careful outline and then model and colour it with delicate touches; Masaccio goes straight at it with the loaded brush, modelling the hair, ears, chin, sternum, and hands as though it were the easiest thing in the world.

We can now move past the Expulsion to the long fresco at the top of the wall. This measures fully twenty feet by eight and a half; and it is universally regarded as one of the most important milestones in the art of the Renaissance.

Let me call attention, first, to the direction of the imagined source of the light. In every scene in the cycle, the light source seems to be the daylight that comes through the window above the altar, such that all the figures on this wall, including the Expulsion, are illuminated from right to left, while all those on the other wall are lit from left to right.

The story itself is a pretty unpromising one from the point of view of a narrative painter, and one not at all common in Western art. It is a kind of hybrid, half way between a folk tale and a miracle, which is told in the Gospel of St. Matthew, chapter 17, immediately after the Transfiguration, when Jesus had just distressed his disciples by prophesying that the Son of Man will be killed:

When they came to Capernaum the collectors of the half shekel tax went up to Peter and they said: “Does not your teacher pay the tax?”. He said, “Yes”. And when he came home, Jesus spoke to him first, saying: “What do you think, Simon? From whom do kings of the earth take toll or tribute? From their sons or from others?”. And when he said, “From others,” Jesus said to him, “Then the sons are free.” However, in order not to give offence to them, go to the sea and cast a hook, and take the first fish that comes up, and when you open its mouth you will find a shekel; take that and give it to them for me and for yourself”.

There are therefore three moments in the story, and our hero is shown three times: echoing his master’s gesture in the direction of the lake while scowling fiercely at the impudent tax man; squatting clumsily beside his cast-off robe, while he prises open the fish’s mouth (Vasari greatly admired the flush of effort on his cheeks, although I can’t see much of a flush); and finally, on the right, thrusting the money contemptuously into the tax collector’s hand, in a gesture that appealed to Michelangelo so much that he made a drawing of it.

It is, of course, to the main group that the picture owes its fame, and we must close in a little (fig. 32) in order to register some of its most important features:

First—and so obvious to us now that we take it for granted—the heads of all members of the group are at the same height, because they are all equally tall and standing on the same flat ground. This is one of the most elementary, and yet most important, consequences of the system of perspective devised by Brunelleschi and Donatello.

Second, the general arrangement is that of a circle or ellipse. This, incidentally, may have been suggested by a sculpture in one of the niches at Orsanmichele, next to Donatello’s St. George, which shows four little-known saints called the Quattro Coronati, ‘the four crowned men’, which was carved in 1413. The four saints stand in a semi-circle, facing inwards, with solemn, rather classical features, and long togas or mantles.

The features of Massacio’s Apostles are ‘truer to life’, anatomically speaking, than anything we saw in Giotto, but they are still appropriately stylised and simplified in a very sculpturesque idiom, so that Andrew, on the left is quite reminiscent of Donatello’s senatorial St. Mark, and so too is Bartholomew, next to St. John (both are uncleaned in the images here given). St. John himself, freshly cleaned, has reminded many people of Donatello’s St. George; not in the proportions of the head and neck (John is much stockier), nor in the nose (John is much more Grecian), but in the spirit or expression—a synthesis of the classical and the modern, or the Christian and the heroic—and also of course in the very sculpturesque treatment of the hair.

The comparison also helps us to see that this head is a wonderful example of Massacio’s powers as an observer of directed light, and as a wielder of colours sticking to a brush. The eye is warm and moist, the light strikes the forehead from the right, catches the bridge of that classical nose, touches the cheek, washes out the natural colour of the lips—then hits the up-facing plane below the mouth and the left of the neck, while leaving all the rest in the shade.

One could and should look at every head in the composition with this kind of care, but let us come back to the grouping, and note the contrast between the rear view of the tax collector, who shows his bandy legs and is the only one in contemporary dress, and the traditional, heavy, timeless, woollen robes of Jesus and the Apostles. Let us register, too, the restrained rhythms of the solemn gestures: Jesus both points and looks to his right; Peter points in the same direction, but faces the tax collector, who gestures both towards Jesus and towards his custom house. The gestures guide the eye ‘outwards’ to the subsequent events on the flanks of the picture.

Finally, one last point about the heads: the Apostle on the right is vivid enough to have been interpreted as a portrait; but Jesus (fig. 37) is so serene, so smoothly modelled, that many (though not all) critics have suggested that it must be the work of Masolino, who would have been called across from the scaffolding on the other wall to paint the face of the Saviour, and to bring out the likeness between the Second Adam and the unfallen Adam of the Temptation Scene.

The first scene to the left of the altar (fig. 39) illustrates the second chapter of Acts, and represents Peter’s first sermon, preached immediately after the descent of the Holy Spirit, which came ‘like the rush of a mighty wind’.

The steep grey hills, their trees now visible again after the restoration, are continuous with the the hills in the Tribute Money. You can see that Peter preached earnestly, and that most of his audience listened attentively (they include two Carmelites). It has to be admitted, though, that some have fallen into a kind of trance, and I am sure you will sense straightaway that this must be the work of Masolino:

As you can see at a glance, all the figures are by Masaccio. The scene itself is briefly described at the end of the same second chapter of Acts. After Peter has concluded his sermon, we read, ‘So those who received his Word were baptised, and there were added that day about three thousand souls’ (2:41)—of whom we see about a dozen. A shallow stream flows toward us, and Peter stands with his feet planted on the diagonal, turning his body slightly back into profile, as he uses a kind of backhand gesture to pour water rather generously, from a good-sized bowl, over the head of the kneeling figure. Placed again on the diagonal, his hair is being washed forward, and his torso, boldly lit and modelled, recalls that of Adam in the Expulsion Scene—Adam, whose ‘original sin’ is being washed away (fig. 42). Behind him, one figure is slipping out of his bath-wrap, while the next in turn, standing in his undergarments in the freezing water, crosses his arms over his breast with an expression that Vasari interpreted as being ‘trembling and shivering with cold’ (fig. 43).

The next pair of scenes, both by Masaccio, lie immediately underneath the ones we have just looked at; so once again, it is important to visualise the altar as being between them. Indeed, the altar space is vital to the double tour de force of perspective, because the orthogonals from the left hand scene meet outside the picture, in the middle of the altar piece, whereas the orthogonals from the right hand scene actually converge on the wall of the left hand scene. Thus, before we even take in the narrative, we are entitled to enjoy the ‘legitimate construction’, which is what Alberti called the new system with the single vanishing point that does not have to be inside the frame of the picture.

The story of this right-hand scene is told at the end of Acts, in chapter 4 and the beginning of chapter 5:

‘There was not a needy person among them, for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold and laid it at the Apostle’s feet; and distribution was made to each as any had need. But a man named Ananias with his wife Sapphira sold a piece of property, and with his wife’s knowledge he kept back some of the proceeds, and brought only a part and laid it at the Apostle’s feet.*

But Peter said, “Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back part of the proceeds of the land? You have not lied to men but to God.” When Ananias heard these words he fell down and died. And great fear came upon all who heard of it’.*

The light is imagined as coming from the central window, and therefore from left to right, and it models (fig. 47) both St John, who is very like he was in the scene with the Tribute Money, and St Peter, whose pudding-bowl haircut makes me think of the black cap that judges used to wear when passing sentences of death. But perhaps the (sculptural) prize must go to the young woman with her bare-bottomed child (fig. 48), both of whom strongly recall the Madonna and Child whom we saw in the altar piece from Pisa.

And so, to the scene on the left, which follows without a break in Acts, chapter 5:

‘Now many signs and wonders were done among the people by the hands of the Apostles.…And more than ever believers were added to the Lord, multitudes both of men and women, so that they even carried out the sick into the streets, and laid them on beds and pallets, that, as Peter came by, at least his shadow might fall on some of them.*

The people also gathered from the towns around Jerusalem, bringing the sick and those afflicted with unclean spirits, and they were all healed’.*

What you see is Peter’s shadow, apparently cast by light from the central window, falling from right to left across the three sick men. The first is already giving thanks for the miracle; the second is rising; the third is looking up, just after the shadow has passed. The miracle is all the more effective, because it is seemingly unwilled by Peter himself.

The detail clearly shows the coats and the garments, as well as the widows. It would be an insult to your intelligence to reminding you that the fresco is by Masolino—you have only to look at Peter’s head as he says ‘Rise’ (fig. 55), or at the serene, round faces of the two men in their fashion-plate hats (fig. 56, right).

In the first scene, to the right and directly opposite Theophilus (fig. 62), Peter and Paul appear in the presence of another autocratic ruler, seated on a throne. This time he is Emperor Nero, and the two apostles have come there as a result of their long-standing confrontation with a gentleman called Simon Magus, a ‘witch doctor’, whose authentic story is told in chapter 8 of the Acts of the Apostles. [FIXME: Here in the printed version pp. 58–9 there are some remarks on details on Lippi’s faces which match the spare slides in the carousel. Do you want me to reintroduce this, or is it tangential to an essay focused primarily on Masaccio?] Peter and Paul are sentenced to death; Paul, being a Roman citizen, is to be beheaded, while Peter, as an alien, is to die by crucifixion. It is his crucifixion which is shown in the left-hand scene, which is slightly bigger (fig. 63).