Without any special knowledge of art one can, by remembering the early date of these frescoes, realize what excitement they must have caused in the studios and how tongues must have clacked in the Old Market.  We have but to send our thoughts to the Spanish chapel at S. Maria Novella to realize the technical advance.  Masaccio, we see, was peopling a visible world; the Spanish chapel painters were merely allegorizing, as agents of holiness.  The Ghirlandaio choir in the same church would yield a similar comparison; but what we have to remember is that Ghirlandaio painted these frescoes in 1490, sixty-two years after Masaccio’s death, and Masaccio showed him how.

It is a pity that the light is so poor and that the frescoes have not worn better; but their force and dramatic vigour remain beyond doubt.  The upper scene on the left of the altar is very powerful:  the Roman tax collector has asked Christ for a tribute and Christ bids Peter find the money in the mouth of a fish.  Figures, architecture, landscape, all are in right relation; and the drama is moving, without restlessness.  This and the S. Peter preaching and distributing alms are perhaps the best, but the most popular undoubtedly is that below it, finished many years after by Filippino Lippi (although there are experts to question this and even substitute his amorous father), in which S. Peter, challenged by Simon Magus, resuscitates a dead boy, just as S. Zenobius used to do in the streets of this city.  Certain more modern touches, such as the exquisite Filippino would naturally have thought of, may be seen here:  the little girl behind the boy, for instance, who recalls the children in that fresco by the same hand at S. Maria Novella in which S. John resuscitates Drusiana.  In this Carmine fresco are many portraits of Filippino’s contemporaries, including Botticelli, just as in the scene of the consecration of the Carmine which Masaccio painted in the cloisters, but which has almost perished, he introduced Brancacci, his employer, Brunelleschi, Donatello, some of whose innovating work in stone he was doing in paint, Giovanni de’ Medici and Masolino.  The scanty remains of this fresco tell us that it must have been fine indeed.

Masaccio died at the early age of twenty-six, having suddenly disappeared from Florence, leaving certain work unfinished.  A strange portentous meteor in art.

The Pitti side of the river is less interesting than the other, but it has some very fascinating old and narrow streets, although they are less comfortable for foreigners to wander in than those, for example, about the Borgo SS.  Apostoli.  They are far dirtier.