Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Simone, called Masaccio — “Clumsy Tom” — was born in 1401 in San Giovanni Valdarno and died in Rome in 1428, at the age of just twenty-six. In his astonishingly brief career he accomplished a revolution in painting that would shape the course of Western art for centuries. Building on the architectural experiments of Brunelleschi and the sculptural naturalism of Donatello, Masaccio was the first painter to apply the mathematical laws of linear perspective consistently, to model figures with a single, coherent light source, and to place them in convincing three-dimensional space.
His frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence, painted around 1424–1427, were the classroom where generations of Renaissance artists learned their craft. The Tribute Money presents a continuous narrative in a landscape of atmospheric depth, its figures heavy and solid, casting real shadows on the ground. The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden conveys the anguish of Adam and Eve with a raw emotional power that anticipates Michelangelo by nearly a century.
His Holy Trinity fresco in Santa Maria Novella, with its perfectly calculated barrel-vaulted chapel receding behind the painted surface, was so convincing that Vasari reported viewers believed a real chapel had been cut into the wall. Masaccio’s early death deprived the world of what he might have achieved, but what he left behind — barely a handful of works — was sufficient to earn him a place alongside Giotto as one of the two great founders of Italian painting.