Masaccio Paints the Brancacci Chapel in Florence

The wealthy merchant Felice Brancacci, who had served as a Florentine ambassador to Cairo, commissioned the painter Masolino da Panicale in the 1420s to decorate the family chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence with frescoes. The chosen subject was the life of Saint Peter, the patron saint of the chapel founder Pietro Brancacci. Masolino brought his young associate, Masaccio, who was eighteen years his junior, to assist on the scaffolding. Painting began in about 1424 or 1425, but when Masolino departed for Hungary, Masaccio took over the primary responsibility for the decorative cycle.

The collaboration between the two artists quickly revealed a sharp contrast in aesthetic approaches. While Masolino worked in the graceful, decorative conventions of the late International Gothic style, Masaccio introduced an uncompromising spatial and emotional realism. This divergence appears starkly on the entrance pillars. Masolino painted a refined and tranquil Temptation of Adam and Eve, set against a dark void with soft, even light. Opposite it, Masaccio produced the Expulsion from the Garden of Eden. In Masaccio's fresco, an armed angel hovers above the biblical pair as they stride weeping into the earthly world. Their heavy limbs are modeled with intense light and cast deep shadows, and their contorted faces convey open guilt and despair.