Masaccio

Masaccio is an Italian Early Renaissance painter, precocious genius who revolutionizes Western painting in the space of a few years and lays the foundations of Renaissance naturalism. Dying at only 26 years old in 1428, he accomplishes in a dazzling career of six years a pictorial revolution that influences all artists of the Florentine Renaissance, from Michelangelo to Raphael. Rejecting ornamental International Gothic, he develops a revolutionary style based on rigorous application of Brunelleschi's scientific linear perspective, sculptural modeling of bodies through chiaroscuro, and naturalistic observation of the human figure that confers weight, volume and monumental physical presence. His frescoes of the Brancacci Chapel in Florence, particularly The Tribute Money and The Expulsion from Paradise, mark a decisive turning point through their dramatic humanity, coherent spatial construction and emotional gravity that breaks with Gothic courtly elegance. First painter to systematically apply scientific principles of perspective and anatomy to pictorial representation, he radically transforms the conception of painting as mimesis of reality and paves the way for the great art of the High Renaissance.