Masaccio reinvented painting—then died at twenty-six
His nickname meant something like messy Tom, yet Masaccio, born Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Simone in 1401, was dead at twenty-six after changing Florentine painting. His heavy, shadowed figures and his Holy Trinity, the oldest surviving picture built on systematic linear perspective, made Brunelleschi lament a great loss.
Born in San Giovanni Valdarno to notary Giovanni Cassai and innkeeper's daughter Jacopa, he lost his father at five; brother Giovanni Lo Scheggia also painted. Guild enrollment as independent master on 7 January 1422 is the first Florence document; San Giovenale Triptych of 1422 and Uffizi Virgin and Child with Saint Anne around 1424 with Masolino already show Giotto-like volume against Gothic fluff.
Friendship with Brunelleschi and Donatello and a likely 1423 Rome trip purged lingering Byzantine habits. Felice Brancacci's Carmine chapel cycle from about 1425 paired Masaccio and Masolino on St Peter narratives plus Adam and Eve's temptation and Expulsion—Michelangelo later studied the shame-struck pair. Tribute Money casts classical apostles with shadows falling as if from the real chapel window; perspective pavements pioneer measurable space.
Eighty florins bought the 1426 Pisa Altarpiece, later scattered to eleven rediscovered panels including London's Madonna. Holy Trinity at Santa Maria Novella around 1427 remains the earliest surviving systematic linear-perspective fresco, nail and strings still marking the vanishing point under the cross. Tomb records point to the Berti, a working-class local family devoted to the Trinity, as likely patrons, probably shown as the man beside the Virgin and the woman beside St John.
Masolino walked away from the Brancacci walls in September 1425 and went to Hungary, for reasons still argued over, and Masaccio broke off in 1426 for other commissions, perhaps because the patron's money was running low. Returning in 1427, he started the Resurrection of the Son of Theophilus, which may have been defaced later that century for portraying Brancacci relatives, by then Medici enemies; Filippino Lippi finished the chapel in the 1480s. A 1771 fire destroyed several scenes now known only from Vasari, and in the twentieth century lifting marble slabs off two patches showed how the frescoes first looked.
Source: Masaccio
