Masaccio was a Florentine painter, born Tommaso di Ser Giovanni in December 1401, who died in Rome in 1428 at about 26. In about six years of work he gave painting figures with real weight, shadows that match the room, and a perspective so exact that a flat wall seems to open into a chapel. He is remembered for the Holy Trinity in Florence and the Brancacci Chapel frescoes, the walls Michelangelo went to copy.
His career left a short list of works: a handful of frescoes in two Florentine churches, one scattered altarpiece, a few panels. Painters kept coming back to those walls for generations.
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The Holy Trinity has a fate of its own. When the church was remodeled in the sixteenth century, Giorgio Vasari, the painter who wrote Masaccio's biography, built a new altar in front of the fresco. Masaccio's masterpiece disappeared behind it for nearly three centuries.
It came back into view in the 1860s, when the altar was taken down. The lower half, the part with the tomb, was found again only in the twentieth century, and the two halves were reunited on the wall in 1952.
That is the pattern with Masaccio. The paintings stand in front of us, and the man behind them is mostly gaps: an unknown teacher, a sudden death far from home, a name that began as an insult.
What You'll Discover
Why his name was an insult.
What the apostles' shadows give away.
What lies beneath the holy figures.
Where the Pisa altarpiece ended up.
How he died, and who got blamed.
Who got punched in his chapel.