Masaccio

The precocious genius Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Simone, otherwise known as Masaccio or ‘shabby Tom’ (1401– c.1428) died young and left few works behind, but gets credit for inaugurating the Renaissance in painting by translating his friends Donatello and Brunelleschi’s perspective onto a flat surface, the first to make use of the vanishing point along with shading to portray a convincing three dimensionality. After Masaccio, Florentine art left behind the decorative idealizing International Gothic and moved towards a more naturalistic and more moving humanism.

Masaccio was the son of a notary in San Giovanni Valdarno near Arezzo, but little is known of his training; he is first documented in Florence in 1422, when he enrolled in the painters' guild, the Arte de' Medici e Speziali. In Florence he could study the works of the earlier revolutionary Giotto; the following year, according to Vasari, he went to Rome with his frequent and already well established collaborator Masolino ('little or delicate Tom'), 18 years his senior to study the ancients.