Brancacci Chapel
This scene and the opposite one (the Expulsion) are the premises to the story narrated in the frescos, showing the moment in which humans severed their union with God, later reconciled by Christ with Peter's mediation.
The painting shows Adam standing near Eve: they look at each other with measured postures, as she prepares to bite on the apple, just offered to her by the serpent near her arm around the tree.
Light, which models the figures without sharp angles, is soft and embracing; the dark background makes the body stand out in their sensual plasticity, almost suspended in space.
It presents a dramatic intensity, with an armed angel who hovers over Adam and Eve indicating the way out of the Garden of Eden: the crying sinners leave at their backs the gates of Paradise.
This work represents a neat separation from the past International Gothic style; Masolino's serene composures are also left behind, and the two biblical progenitors are portrayed in dark desperation, weighed down under the angel's stern sight, who, with his unsheathed sword, forcibly expels them, with such a tension never seen before in painting.
The bodies' dynamism, especially Adam's, gives an unprecedented passion to the figures, firmly planted on ground and projecting shadows from the violent light modelling them.
Many are the details which increase the emotional drama: Adam's damp and sticky hair (on Earth, he'll struggle with hard labour and dirt), the angel's posture, foreshortened as if diving down from above.
In the left lunette, destroyed in 1746-48, Masolino had painted the Calling of Peter and Andrew, or Vocation, known thanks to some indications by past witnesses such as Vasari, Bocchi and Baldinucci.
Roberto Longhi first identified an image of this lost fresco in a later drawing, which does not conform to the lunette's upper curvature, but appears today as a very probable hypothesis.
The opposite lunette housed the fresco of the Navicella, a traditional title for the scene where Christ, walking on water, rescues Peter from the surging waves of a storm and pulls him aboard the boat.
The most famous painting in the chapel is Tribute Money, on the upper left wall, with figures of Jesus and Peter shown in a three part narrative.
[8] The miracle is not represented in a hagiographic key, but as a human occurrence that posits a divine decision: a historical event, then, with an explicit and indubitable moral meaning.
The absence of a chronological scansion in the narrative, is to be sought in the fact that the painting's salient motif is not so much the miracle, as the actuation of the Divine Will, expressed by Jesus' the imperative gesture.
The portico's pillar becomes a symbolic element of separation between the grouped apostles and the conclusive delivery of tribute to the tax collector on Peter's part.
The scene shows two different episodes, with St. Peter appearing in both of them enclosed in a scenario of a typical Tuscan city of the 15th century depicted according to the strict rules of central perspective.
The people in the group have many and varied demeanours, from the sweet attention of the veiled nun in the foreground, to the sleepiness of both the girl behind her and the bearded old man, to the fear of the woman at back, whose worried eyes only can be seen.
The whole composition presents details of astounding realism: the trembling neophyte, the water droplets from the baptised hair, the white sheet being removed in the background.
The picture's attribution to Masaccio is based in on the perspective structure used to create the street setting and the craggy naturalism of the physiognomies of the old man and the cripple.
According to the Legenda Aurea (Golden Legend) by Jacobus de Voragine, after release from prison, St. Peter resuscitates, with St Paul's assistance, Theophilus's son, who had died fourteen years before.
[19] There is a precise iconographic resemblance between Theophilus (seated on the left, in an elevated position within a niche) and Gian Galeazzo Visconti, Florence's bitter enemy.
Memory of this episode returned in all its crude vividness, when Florence had to confront a dispute with Filippo Maria Visconti, Gian Galeazzo's son.
St Peter's presence, therefore, symbolizes the mediating role of the Church in the person of Pope Martin V, to sedate the conflict between Milan and Florence.
At the extreme right, a group of four bystanders should personify Masaccio (looking away from the painting), Masolino (the shortest one), Leon Battista Alberti (in the foreground); and Filippo Brunelleschi (the last).
The fresco's figures populate a dilated space of their own world and have a natural demeanor: they stretch their necks to see better, they look over their neighbour's shoulder, gesticulate, observe, and gossip about the event with the next bystander.
Moreover, the commissioning patron's exile in 1436 hindered any possibility of the frescos completion by other artists; in fact, it is probable that some parts already painted by Masaccio were removed as a sort of damnatio memoriae, because of their portraiture of the Brancacci family members.
Only with the return of this family to Florence in 1480, the frescos could be resumed, by commissioning the artist closer and more faithful to the great Masaccio tradition, that is to say, Filippino Lippi, the son of his first apprentice.
The sword-armed guard sleeps in the foreground, leaning on a stick, whilst the miraculous rescue is happening – this implies Christian salvation, as well as perhaps Florence's recovered autonomy after the contention with Milan.
In Simon Magus, some critics wish to see the poet Dante Alighieri, celebrated as the creator of the renowned Italian vernacular used by Lorenzo il Magnifico and Agnolo Poliziano.
