[Page heading: MASACCIO]
Giotto born again, starting where death had cut short his advance,
instantly making his own all that had been gained during his absence,
and profiting by the new conditions, the new demands--imagine such an
avatar, and you will understand Masaccio.
Giotto we know already, but what were the new conditions, the new
demands? The mediæval skies had been torn asunder and a new heaven and a
new earth had appeared, which the abler spirits were already inhabiting
and enjoying. Here new interests and new values prevailed. The thing of
sovereign price was the power to subdue and to create; of sovereign
interest all that helped man to know the world he was living in and his
power over it. To the artist the change offered a field of the freest
activity. It is always his business to reveal to an age its ideals. But
what room was there for sculpture and painting,--arts whose first
purpose it is to make us realise the material significance of things--in
a period like the Middle Ages, when the human body was denied all
intrinsic significance? In such an age the figure artist can thrive, as
Giotto did, only in spite of it, and as an isolated phenomenon. In the
Renaissance, on the contrary, the figure artist had a demand made on him
such as had not been made since the great Greek days, to reveal to a
generation believing in man's power to subdue and to possess the world,
the physical types best fitted for the task. And as this demand was
imperative and constant, not one, but a hundred Italian artists arose,
able each in his own way to meet it,--in their combined achievement,
rivalling the art of the Greeks.
In sculpture Donatello had already given body to the new ideals when
Masaccio began his brief career, and in the education, the awakening, of
the younger artist the example of the elder must have been of
incalculable force. But a type gains vastly in significance by being
presented in some action along with other individuals of the same type;
and here Donatello was apt, rather than to draw his meed of profit, to
incur loss by descending to the obvious--witness his _bas-reliefs_ at
Siena, Florence, and Padua. Masaccio was untouched by this taint.
Types, in themselves of the manliest, he presents with a sense for the
materially significant which makes us realise to the utmost their power
and dignity; and the spiritual significance thus gained he uses to give
the highest import to the event he is portraying; this import, in turn,
gives a higher value to the types, and thus, whether we devote our
attention to his types or to his action, Masaccio keeps us on a high
plane of reality and significance. In later painting we shall easily
find greater science, greater craft, and greater perfection of detail,
but greater reality, greater significance, I venture to say, never.
Dust-bitten and ruined though his Brancacci Chapel frescoes now are, I
never see them without the strongest stimulation of my tactile
consciousness. I feel that I could touch every figure, that it would
yield a definite resistance to my touch, that I should have to expend
thus much effort to displace it, that I could walk around it. In short,
I scarcely could realise it more, and in real life I should scarcely
realise it so well, the attention of each of us being too apt to
concentrate itself upon some dynamic quality, before we have at all
begun to realise the full material significance of the person before us.
Then what strength to his young men, and what gravity and power to his
old! How quickly a race like this would possess itself of the earth, and
brook no rivals but the forces of nature! Whatever they do--simply
because it is they--is impressive and important, and every movement,
every gesture, is world-changing. Compared with his figures, those in
the same chapel by his precursor, Masolino, are childish, and those by
his follower, Filippino, unconvincing and without significance, because
without tactile values. Even Michelangelo, where he comes in rivalry,
has, for both reality and significance, to take a second place. Compare
his "Expulsion from Paradise" (in the Sixtine Chapel) with the one here
by Masaccio. Michelangelo's figures are more correct, but far less
tangible and less powerful; and while he represents nothing but a man
warding off a blow dealt from a sword, and a woman cringing with ignoble
fear, Masaccio's Adam and Eve stride away from Eden heart-broken with
shame and grief, hearing, perhaps, but not seeing, the angel hovering
high overhead who directs their exiled footsteps.
Masaccio, then, like Giotto a century earlier,--himself the Giotto of an
artistically more propitious world--was, as an artist, a great master of
the significant, and, as a painter, endowed to the highest degree with a
sense of tactile values, and with a skill in rendering them. In a career
of but few years he gave to Florentine painting the direction it pursued
to the end. In many ways he reminds us of the young Bellini. Who knows?
Had he but lived as long, he might have laid the foundation for a
painting not less delightful and far more profound than that of Venice.
As it was, his frescoes at once became, and for as long as there were
real artists among them remained, the training-school of Florentine
painters.