It must have been about the same time when Fra Angelico was covering
the walls of San Marco with his angel pictures, that a very different
kind of painter was working in the Carmine church in Florence.
This was no gentle, refined monk, but just an ordinary man of the
world--an awkward, good-natured person, who, as long as he had pictures
to paint, cared for little else. Why, he would even forget to ask for
payment when his work was done; and as to taking care of his clothes,
or trying to keep himself tidy, that was a thing he never thought of!
What trouble his mother must have had with him when he was a boy! It
was no use sending him on an errand, he would forget it before he had
gone a hundred yards, and he was so careless and untidy that it was
enough to make any one lose patience with him. But only let him have a
pencil and a smooth surface on which to draw, and he was a different
boy.
It is said that even now, in the little town of Castello San Giovanni,
some eighteen miles from Florence, where Tommaso was born, there are
still some wonderfully good figures to be seen, drawn by him when he
was quite a little boy. Certainly there was no carelessness and nothing
untidy about his work.
As the boy grew older all his longings would turn towards Florence, the
beautiful city where there was everything to learn and to see, and so
he was sent to become a pupil in the studio of Masolino, a great
Florentine painter. But though his drawings improved, his careless
habits continued the same.
'There goes Tommaso the painter,' the people would say, watching the
big awkward figure passing through the streets on his way to work.
'Truly he pays but little heed to his appearance. Look but at his
untidy hair and the holes in his boots.'
'Ay, indeed!' another would answer; 'and yet it is said if only people
paid him all they owed he would have gold enough and to spare. But what
cares he so long as he has his paints and brushes? "Masaccio" would be
a fitter name for him than Tommaso.'
So the name Masaccio, or Ugly Tom, came to be that by which the big
awkward painter was known. But no one thinks of the unkind meaning of
the nickname now, for Masaccio is honoured as one of the great names in
the history of Art.
This painter, careless of many things, cared with all his heart and
soul for the work he had chosen to do. It seemed to him that painters
had always failed to make their pictures like living things. The
pictures they painted were flat, not round as a figure should be, and
very often the feet did not look as if they were standing on the ground
at all, but pointed downwards as if they were hanging in the air.
So he worked with light and shadow and careful drawing until the
figures he drew looked rounded instead of flat, and their feet were
planted firmly on the ground. His models were taken from the ordinary
Florentine youths whom he saw daily in the studio, but he drew them as
no one had drawn figures before. The buildings, too, he made to look
like real houses leading away into the distance, and not just like a
flat picture.
He painted many frescoes both in Florence and Rome, this Ugly Tom, but
at the time the people did not pay him much honour, for they thought
him just a great awkward fellow with his head always in the clouds.
Perhaps if he had lived longer fame and wealth would have come to him,
but he died when he was still a young man, and only a few realised how
great he was.
But in after years, one by one, all the great artists would come to
that little chapel of the Carmine there to learn their first lessons
from those life-like figures. Especially they would stand before the
fresco which shows St. Peter baptizing a crowd of people. And in that
fresco they would study more than all the figure of a boy who has just
come out of the water, shivering with cold, the most natural figure
that had ever been painted up to that time.
All things must be learnt little by little, and each new thing we know
is a step onwards. So this figure of the shivering boy marks a higher
step of the golden ladder of Art than any that had been touched before.
And this alone would have made the name of Masaccio worthy to be placed
upon the list of world's great painters.