Lafayette faculty are experts in their fields. Interests among the 184 members range across the full spectrum of scientific, technological, and humanistic knowledge. In "From the Classroom," faculty members give insight into their particular subject, providing a window on the intellectual rigor that characterizes the environment of academic excellence at Lafayette. This issue features an excerpt from The Cambridge Companion to Masaccio, edited with introduction and essay "Masaccio in the Brancacci Chapel" by Diane Cole Ahl (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Identified in Leon Battista Alberti's treatise On Painting (1435/6) among the creators of a new style of art, Masaccio [Tommaso di Giovanni di Simone Guidi] (1401-28) ever since has been recognized as the founder of 15th-century Florentine painting. In a career lasting less than a decade before his death at age 27, Masaccio transformed the course of Renaissance art. His works are universally renowned: The Santa Maria Novella Trinity, the earliest extant painting composed in accord with Brunelleschian perspective; the London Madonna and Child with Angels from the dismembered Pisa Altarpiece (1426); and the magisterial frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel, Santa Maria del Carmine, executed in collaboration with Masolino. His contributions to Renaissance art include the solemn portrayal of narrative, the mathematical construction of space, the consistent illumination of form, and the depiction of figures possessing extraordinary physical and psychological realism. Such innovations were as crucial to later generations as they seemed to their own contemporaries. Leonardo da Vinci celebrated Masaccio in his treatise on painting (c. 1498) for halting the "decline" of painting that had prevailed since Giotto's death. Giorgio Vasari, whose Lives of the Most Illustrious Painters, Sculptors, and Architects—Le vite de' più eccellenti pittori scultori ed architettori (1550, 1568)—has influenced criticism to this day, praised Masaccio for inspiring the "new rebirth" of painting.

Diane Cole Ahl (left) discusses images on a 2nd century A.D. Egyptian papyrus with Maura Dailey '04 (L-R), Jennifer Forsberg '05, Ryan McCaughey '06, and Kathryn Gifford '05 in an art history class. From the Book of the Dead, it is a rare treasure preserved in Skillman Library Special Collections.

Vasari introduced his vita of Masaccio by proclaiming the opening years of the 15th century in Florence as a golden age, when the city "produced at one and the same time Filippo [Brunelleschi], Donatello, Lorenzo [Ghiberti], Paolo Uccello, and Masaccio, each superb in his own field." While recognizing the greatness of "these founders," Vasari elevated Masaccio above them all because of his superiority in the art of painting, from his natural rendering of figures and movement to his mastery of foreshortening, which even "exceeded" that of Uccello, famous for his exploration of perspective. So intense was Masaccio's devotion to his art, Vasari related, that the artist cared little about clothing or money, even failing to collect debts, despite his poverty. For this reason, Vasari explained, he affectionately was called Masaccio ("careless Tom"). Vasari concluded his account of Masaccio's life with a moving encomium of the Brancacci Chapel. Declaring that Masaccio finished what Masolino began, he eloquently described the Tribute Money and the man shivering with cold in Saint Peter Baptizing the Neophytes.

Of all the works of Masaccio, the Brancacci Chapel seems most crucial to our understanding of his contributions to Renaissance art and his place within it. Painted by Masolino and Masaccio around 1425 and left unfinished until its completion by Filippino Lippi in the 1480s, the cycle portrays the original sin of Adam and Eve and its redemption through the life of the apostle Peter, Christ's vicar and first pope. To many, these scenes seem to illustrate the dichotomy between tradition and innovation: what is generally deemed the late Gothic style of the older Masolino, and the nascent Renaissance sensibility of Masaccio, an artist, Vasari proclaimed, "so far in advance of that which had been painted until his time that his work surely can stand comparison in its drawing and color to anything modern." . . . Vasari's glorification of the Brancacci Chapel—as a monument so reflective of Masaccio's genius that it seemed to transcend time instead of being a product of its moment—has decisively shaped the way in which we have been led to think about the chapel to this day.

Our distance from the Brancacci Chapel has increased dramatically since Vasari wrote his encomium in the mid-16th century. Notwithstanding his praise, the chapel was regarded as outmoded 200 years after its completion. In the 1670s, the vogue for pietre dure inspired the addition of marble wainscoting, an elaborate balustrade, and a new altar and frame for the Madonna del Popolo, which had been installed in the chapel by 1454. Between 1746 and 1748, the original vaults, painted with the four evangelists by Masolino, were replaced by Vincenzo Meucci's Madonna Giving the Carmelite Scapular to Saint Simon Stock, a fresco whose disproportionately large figures dwarf the scenes below. Joining Meucci's dome to the walls, architectural vistas by Carlo Sacconi obliterated Masolino's lunettes of the Calling of Peter and Andrew and Saint Peter Walking on Water. Replacing the Denial of Peter and Feed My Sheep, known only through their sinopie [underdrawings], a wide, arched window was installed above the original Gothic one. After the fire that swept the Carmine in 1771, restoration was undertaken to recover a luminosity lost centuries earlier, with unsatisfactory results.

Frescoes in Brancacci Chapel

At the same time, much about the Brancacci Chapel eludes us as modern-day witnesses to its fame. We are precluded from knowing the work by our remoteness from the 15th-century, our tendency to heroize Masaccio, and our obsession with attribution and dating, matters of less concern to its original audience. We can no longer view the church as it was when the murals were begun, for virtually nothing remains of the Carmine's original decoration: the Gothic vaults; the stained-glass windows of saints and martyrs; the chapels frescoed by such late Trecento masters as Agnolo Gaddi, Spinello Aretino, Lippo d'Andrea, and Starnina. Finally, we cannot experience the Brancacci as did the devout in the Quattrocento or even as did scholars through the early 1980s. Isolated from the rest of the church and accessed by a separate entrance, the chapel is a monument that we now view as spectators who must pay to regard its display.

Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.