The other great church in the Pitti quarter is the Carmine, and here we are on very sacred ground in art—­for it was here, as I have had occasion to say more than once in this book, that Masaccio painted those early frescoes which by their innovating boldness turned the Brancacci chapel into an Academy.  For all the artists came to study and copy them:  among others Michelangelo, whose nose was broken by the turbulent Torrigiano, a fellow-student, under this very roof.

Tommaso di Ser Giovanni, or Masaccio, the son of a notary, was born in 1402.  His master is not known, but Tommaso Fini or Masolino, born in 1383, is often named.  Vasari states that as a youth Masaccio helped Ghiberti with his first Baptistery doors; and if so, the fact is significant.  But all that is really known of his early life is that he went to Rome to paint a chapel in S. Clemente.  He returned, apparently on hearing that his patron Giovanni de’ Medici was in power again.  Another friend, Brunelleschi, having built the church of S. Spirito in 1422, Masaccio began to work there in 1423, when he was only twenty-one.

Masaccio’s peculiar value in the history of painting is his early combined power of applying the laws of perspective and representing human beings “in the round”.  Giotto was the first and greatest innovator in painting—­the father of real painting; Masaccio was the second.  If from Giotto’s influence a stream of vigour had flowed such as flowed from Masaccio’s, there would have been nothing special to note about Masaccio at all.  But the impulse which Giotto gave to art died down; some one had to reinvigorate it, and that some one was Masaccio.  In his remarks on painting, Leonardo da Vinci sums up the achievements of the two.  They stood out, he says, from the others of their time, by reason of their wish to go to life rather than to pictures.  Giotto went to life, his followers went to pictures; and the result was a decline in art until Masaccio, who again went to life.

From the Carmine frescoes came the new painting.  It is not that walls henceforth were covered more beautifully or suitably than they had been by Giotto’s followers; probably less suitably very often; but that religious symbolism without much relation to actual life gave way to scenes which might credibly have occurred, where men, women and saints walked and talked much as we do, in similar surroundings, with backgrounds of cities that could be lived in and windows that could open.  It was this revolution that Masaccio performed.  No doubt if he had not, another would, for it had to come:  the new demand was that religion should be reconciled with life.

It is generally supposed that Masaccio had Masolino as his ally in this wonderful series; and a vast amount of ink has been spilt over Masolino’s contributions.  Indeed the literature of expert art criticism on Florentine pictures alone is of alarming bulk and astonishing in its affirmations and denials.  The untutored visitor in the presence of so much scientific variance will be wise to enact the part of the lawyer in the old caricature of the litigants and the cow, who, while they pull, one at the head and the other at the tail, fills his bucket with milk.  In other words, the plain duty of the ordinary person is to enjoy the picture.