Masaccio's Early Career as a Sculptor

Abstract

Leonardo aside, most observers would agree that Masaccio and Mantegna were the most influential painters of the Italian quattrocento. Mantegna established new directions in wall and ceiling painting that have been perpetuated for centuries; his impact on printmaking was fundamental; and his figures were ineradicably impressed upon the memories of a regiment of painters who followed him. But Mantegna does not belong to the very beginning of the new Renaissance style for which he was an outstanding spokesman. He had the advantage of the pursuits and elaborations of a full generation of innovative painters including Uccello and Piero della Francesca and was thereby able to start at a point far beyond the beginning. The situation Masaccio had faced more than a generation earlier was quite different since the tradition immediately available to him offered little for the new direction he was to take in painting. Certain aspects of his mature style, if we may speak of an artist who died before he reached the age of twenty-seven or twenty-eight as having a mature style, can be traced back to early trecento masters whose spatial solutions and figure compositions prepared the way for Masaccio at least in a generic way. Masaccio's solutions are too drastic, however, to allow the claim that there is anything like a gradual evolution from, say, Giotto. Because his position is basic for the development of the painting style in which Mantegna and Leonardo, inter alios, operated, the life of Masaccio –though abortive in actual years – has long engaged the attention of scholars.