The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance | Page 8

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