Renaissance_ A Short History, The - Johnson, Paul [55]
Looking back from the vantage point of the mid–sixteenth century, Vasari divided the development of art into three periods, the first introduced by Giotto, the second by Masaccio, the third by Leonardo. There is some truth in this, but it is not the whole truth. The common opinion among artists, at any rate by the mid–fifteenth century, was that Giotto’s followers and successors failed to improve materially on his performance because they neglected the study of nature. Masaccio, coming more than half a century later, “restored” his work and improved upon it. Hence he is often seen as the first great Renaissance painter, though in justice to Giotto, he ought to be called the second. Unlike Giotto, who was a harbinger of the Renaissance, Masaccio was a beneficiary of it: he was aware of the classical texts on painting, he knew far more about the recovered literature, he was infused with the spirit of antiquity in a way that was impossible in the early fourteenth century. More important, perhaps, he benefited from both the perspective work of Brunelleschi and the figure rendering of Donatello. In effect his entire working life was less than a decade, and much of his output has been lost. But, thanks to the outstanding sculptors among whom he worked, he did two things that were beyond Giotto. First, in for instance the central panel of an altarpiece, Virgin and Child, now in the National Gallery, London, and still more in the Trinity fresco in Santa Maria Novella, Florence, he made his perspective settings look natural, something he had clearly learned from intense study of Brunelleschi’s demonstration panels. Second, in his beautiful panel St. Paul, from the Pisa Altarpiece, he produced a genuine three-quarter-length portrait study of the saint, painted with wonderful facility, the face and hands rendered with grace, sensitivity and confidence. The influence of Donatello’s figure statues is transparent, but Masaccio adds a softness and sympathy that the fierce Donatello lacks. The same spirit infuses the beautiful fresco Tribute Money, which Masaccio painted on the wall of the Brancacci Chapel in the Florentine church of Santa Maria del Carmine. Figures, houses and background mountains do not blend with the perfection of nature. But the artist is almost there. This was painted in 1427, nearly a century after Giotto’s best work, and it shows that a great deal had been learned in those hundred years. It is not surprising that Alberti almost certainly had Masaccio in mind as the model painter of the age (1436), though by then he had been dead eight years.
Indeed, with the passing of Masaccio it becomes impossible to see Italian painting simply as an apostolic succession. So much by now had been learned, and so many had learned it, that art was branching out in different, sometimes rival and even contradictory directions. The new freedom conveyed by knowledge, to place realistic figures in convincing space, allowed individual artists to develop their own personalities with an energy and imagination that had been impossible before 1420.
There was, for instance, Paolo Uccello, who was a little older than Masaccio and lived a great deal longer, 1397–1475. He developed a lifelong fascination with perspective, and acquired a remarkable mastery of it. He loved foreshortening to the point of frenzy and geometry as a science as well as an art. Nature he was much less interested in, however, though he was lucky enough to work under Ghiberti. His three great panels, The Battle of San Romano, now split up and in Paris, Florence and London, are almost a demonstration, like Brunelleschi’s panels, of the techniques of perspective and foreshortening. But the knights look like toy soldiers riding rocking horses, and the battleground is a floor rather than a field. Yet the images are memorable, indeed stunning, and there is an engrossing charm in the best of Uccello’s work, such as the Hunting Scene in the Oxford Ashmolean. It is not nature; it is art, of a highly