temporary relief. But the dramatic sense was stronger in the artist than the tradition of the Church. The composition on the whole is a wide departure from the treatment of previous times.

The left wall of the chapel is devoted to the life of St. Catherine of Alexandria. In the first fresco she is disputing with the doctors, while Maxentius sits listening. Above is a subject representing St. Catherine refusing to worship an idol, many richly dressed persons looking on. Then come the conversion and martyrdom of the empress in one picture, in the former of which the saint is shown, looking out of her prison window, teaching the empress her doctrine, while in the latter is represented the decapitation of the convert. In another double subject are shown the attempt to tear the saint on the wheel and the intervention of the angel, who with his sword shatters the wheels between which the saint stands, the assistants fleeing in terror; the last shows the martyrdom of the saint, who kneels with folded hands awaiting the headsman's stroke while a file of men-at-arms keep back the crowd and an angel waits to carry off the soul of the martyr, and three others on a distant mountain-top bury her body. The four frescos on the opposite wall do not seem to me to justify their attribution, and I must consider them later and by another hand. Vasari tells us that Masaccio, among other pictures executed in Rome, painted one in a chapel of Sta. Maria Maggiore in which the Madonna accompanied by four saints, "so well executed as to seem in relief," presides over the tracing of the foundation of the church by Pope Liberius, under the likeness of Martin V., while the Emperor Sigismund is looking on. Cavalcaselle is disposed to recognize this picture in one in the gallery at Naples, which represents the pope in his pontifical vestments surrounded by cardinals and clergy, tracing the plan in the snow, while a richly but not regally dressed person, who may be Sigismund, is looking on surrounded by young men and women.

pictures in the Brancacci Chapel at Florence, which have always been given to the same artist."

In his notes on Vasari's sketch of Masaccio, Dr. Richter gives the following opinion in regard to the Roman work which Mr. Stillman follows Vasari in attributing to Masaccio: "There is no consistency whatever in the statement that the wall-paintings at San Clemente, Rome, were by Giotto. This is an hypothesis which sound criticism will feel bound to reject as preposterous. Vasari ascribes them to Masaccio, and Messrs. Crowe and Cavalcaselle in their History of Painting' accept this attribution. They do not deny the apparent divergency of style in these paintings when compared with well-authenticated works of Masaccio, but they believe these can be reconciled by the hypothesis that the fresco-paintings of San Clemente are very early works of Masaccio (Italian edition, 1883, Vol. II., p. 281). However, in the opinion of the present writer the existing difficulVOL. XXXVIII.-86.

In the sky are half-figures of the Virgin and Christ.

Masaccio left Rome for Florence in 1420-21; and as Masolino, who seems to have been originally charged with the decoration of the Brancacci Chapel in the Carmine, had gone to Hungary, Masaccio was intrusted with the work. When he returned to Rome is not exactly known; but his poverty in Florence-a poverty which even the accession to power of his friend Giovanni di Bicci dei Medici did not relieve— probably sent him back, never to return. The scheduling of the property and incomes of the citizens instituted by Giovanni in 1427 shows that Masaccio lived with his younger brother Giovanni, and that though he earned six soldi a day he was in debt to the amount of one hundred and two lire and four soldi to one of his fellow-painters, six florins to another creditor, and had pledged his valuables at the pawnshop. Niccolo di Ser Lapo in his income-return of 1427 says that Masaccio owed him 200 lire, and in 1430 there was still 68 lire of it due, and that he had no hope of ever getting it, as Masaccio had gone to Rome and died there and his brother Giovanni declined the responsibility for the debt. In the census-return of 1429 Masaccio is set down as being twentyfive years old, but his name is then crossed out, with the annotation, "Died at Rome"; but no record or tradition tells how.

In the long record of the contrast of fortune to which the children of genius are victims there is none more pitiful than this of Masaccio. Columbus giving a new world to Castile and Leon and coming home in chains is more startling because more conspicuous, but Masaccio opening the future of art to glories unseen before him and then vanishing in poverty, unable to pay the debts he had incurred for the material of his art, and dying in his youth with his powers in their first freshness, is far more pathetic. Raphael died young, but he had come to his old age in art, while the eagle eyes of young Masaccio were seeking fields for new ties cannot be overcome by this new suggestion. After a careful study of the works of Masolino at Castiglione and at Florence, and of those by Masaccio at Florence, it appears to him impossible to deny that the frescos at San Clemente are by the hand of Masolino, and not of Masaccio, and this explanation is by no means a new one. Rumohr has already expressed a doubt that they are by Masaccio (Ital. Forschungen,' II., p. 250). A. von Zahn has claimed them for Masolino (Jahrbücher der Kunstwissenschaft,' II., p. 155). See also Woltmann and Woermann (Geschichte der Malerei,' II., pp. 139,140). Vasari tells us that the frescos were ordered by the cardinal of San Clemente. It is a striking coincidence that between the years 1411 and 1420, when we may expect that these paintings were executed, the cardinalate of San Clemente was in the hands of Branda of Castiglione, of whom we know that he was Masolino's patron." -EDITOR.

triumphs, and closed just as those of his followers were opening to what he pointed out. That the authorship of the frescos of S. Clemente should be attributed, as they are by Burckhardt and Zahn, to Masolino is, as I have said, not surprising, for the extreme naïveté of most of them may easily be attributed to the immature art instead of to the immature artist; but the technical analysis to which Cavalcaselle and others have subjected them leaves no reasonable question in the matter. The execution of them is timid in comparison with that of the work in the Brancacci Chapel; but this is precisely what we might expect, and that there should be something reminding us of the master is not more surprising than that some of Raphael's earlier pictures should be attributed to Perugino. The figure of the executioner in the "Martyrdom of St. Catherine" is like a prophecy of Raphael, while the treatment of the mystic portion of the pic ture is still in the feeling of the Giottesques, and the angel waiting in the sky on a rosy cloud for the soul of the saint to come up is quite in the vein of the protomaster, Giotto. The four heads in the lower left-hand corner of "The Crucifixion" are distinctly in the direction of that individuality of type due to the painter's selection of the people of his own day as models for the historic personages he supposes in his work. It is as if the artist had begun to realize that the men around him might be much such as the men he had to deal with in his story. There is evidence, not of realism in his method of working, but of healthy imagination in the calling up of his material; and he tells his stories with the same freedom that Giotto enjoyed. He gives us in the same picture, in all the spirit of orthodox art, St. Catherine standing between the wheels, ready for the torture, and the wheels flying into pieces and crushing the torturers; but in the scene of the decapitation, quite in the vein of modern art, there are some curious spectators beyond the line of guards trying to thrust themselves through to see the execution, while the body of the saint has fallen to the ground in the first instant of death, and the executioner is sheathing his sword.

I may as well point out here the meaning I shall attach to the puzzling words "realism" and "naturalism," because we must now take cognizance of the matters they imply, Masaccio being the first of the painters with whom we have to deal who showed a distinct recognition of the every-day world as a mine of his art. Fra Angelico has the variety of type which the ends of art require for the distinguishing of his sacred personages, and at all times and naturally the images of memory must have mixed in the texture of the dreams even of ecstatics like

him; but the types are, to my mind, the types of dreams, or, as in Giotto, of pure imagination. In Masaccio, and the men who follow, the ecstatic disappears, and we are in a world whose images may not be real and capable of a realistic rendering, but clearly are drawn from the natural world in contradistinction to the supernatural or conventional and symbolical, and in which, without coming down to the servitude of the model or of rigid portraiture, the standards are those of what they saw about them. The study of these forms in the succeeding generations of painters was closer and closer, or, as it seems to me, tending continually more to the direct use of the model, which becomes absolute only in the school of Bologna; but beyond the free and noble naturalism which was only inspired by nature and retained the freedom of art there is the internal evidence of a growing tendency to realism, in which not the spirit but the very letter of the art was taken slavishly from the actual and material world. It is in this sense that I say that Masaccio was the first naturalistic painter. The ecstatic is henceforward impossible, and we see more and more the evidence of the hints of art being taken from what has been within the apprehension of all who had eyes to see.

But the art of Masaccio is still ideal and contains the germs of the highest development of the schools of Central Italy—the mastery of composition of many figures which came to its fullest in Raphael, and in some cases in his cartoons even to the overbloom of artifice. Take, for instance, the "Resuscitation of the Young Man," from the Brancacci Chapel, "The Tribute Money," or the "St. Peter Baptizing," and compare them even with the composition of Giotto, and we become at once aware that a new element has been introduced into art-harmony of line and balance of masses fixing the character of the work. And in this Masaccio is an innovator, for he is the first who made this the motive of his art, and he did it with a naïveté and a consequent power which we do not find to the same degree in the later men. The woestricken Adam and Eve in the "Expulsion from Paradise," in the Brancacci Chapel, are of a simpler type, and in this simplicity show more clearly the dramatic power of the artist. In both types of his work we see that art was taking on an independent existence and was being studied for its own charms, and no longer merely as the accompaniment of devotion or the vehicle of a story. It is long after this before Religion and Art are dissevered, but from this time they have existences independent more and more of each other.

W. J. Stillman.

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PLAN OF THE FRESCOS OF THE BRANCACCI CHAPEL IN THE
CHURCH OF STA. MARIA DEL CARMINE, Florence.

1. The Expulsion from Paradise. Masaccio. — 2. Peter in Prison visited by Paul. Filippino Lippi.-3. The Tribute Money; Masaccio.-4. Peter accepts the Challenge to Simon Magus and raises the Dead Youth to Life. Partly by Masaccio and partly by Filippino Lippi.-5. The Preaching of Peter. Masaccio.-6. The Sick and Deformed cured by the Shadow of Peter (Acts v. 15. Here accompanied by John). Masaccio.-7. Peter Baptiz ing. Masaccio.-8. Peter and John distributing Alms (sometimes called the Ananias; a dead figure lies at the feet of the Apostles). Masaccio.-9. Healing of the Cripple at the Beautiful Gate, and Cure of Petronilla. Masolino. -10. Peter and Paul accused before Nero, and Martyrdom of Peter. Filippino Lippi-11. The Fall of Adam and Eve. Masolino.-12. Liberation of Peter from Prison by the Angel. Filippino Lippi. (See Cugler's "Italian Schools," by Layard, Vol. I., p. 143.)

MAS ASACCIO'S fresco of "The Tribute Money "(No. 3 of the plan), from which the detail of the head of Christ with three of the Apostles is taken, measures eight feet high by eighteen feet four inches long. This also is the size of the three corresponding pictures, Nos. 4,9, and 10. The frescos at the sides of the altar are five feet wide, and those on the pilasters, which project six inches from the wall, are three feet wide. They are separated from each other by a narrow framework, six inches wide, painted with the pictures, in imitation of a cornice resting on pilasters at each end of each fresco. In the large pictures different moments of the same event, or different subjects, are presented in the same picture. For instance, in "The Tribute Money" Christ stands in the midst of his disciples. The tax-gatherer, with his back to the spectator, in the immediate foreground, is presenting his hand for the tribute (the hand and part of the shoulder only are shown in the detail); while Christ commands Peter, who is not shown in the detail, to get the necessary money from the mouth of the

fish. This is the principal event of the picture and is disposed in the center, taking up half of the space, the figures being nearly life-size. To the left, in the background, Peter is seen down by the waterside in the act of taking the coin from the mouth of the fish. The action is finely expressed as he crouches down, with his weight chiefly on one leg, the other being extended. To the right of the central group Peter is represented paying the tribute to the officer; broad, simple architecture rises behind the two figures. The landscape is noble. A stretch of mountain scenery and sky, with a few trees receding in perspective, and a river to the left, forms the background to Christ and his disciples. The coloring is of soft, warm, gray tints, fine in quality. A quiet, subtle richness of tone characterizes the draperies of various shades of color, all blending together harmoniously and delightfully in a low and tender key. It is impossible by words to give any idea of such coloring. It is simply indescribable. One cannot mix words up, as he can pigments, with intelligible results, and so, for instance, be able to set forth the tone of red in the drapery of Christ, or the overrobe of blue so pleasant to look upon, and as soothing to the imagination as to the eye. To glance up at the abominable modern ceiling of the chapel gives one a shock like the unexpected blare of a brass instrument close to the ear.

The figures throughout have a quiet, dignified bearing; the attitude of Christ is magnificent. The eye falls naturally upon him at once, taking in the broad play of light from the outstretched arm, while the air of commanding dignity, and the beauty of the neck, barer than those of the others, aid in distinguishing him. But one needs to mount a step-ladder and get nearer to the picture to appreciate at their full value the moral strength and manly beauty of Christ's countenance, his nobility and strong personality, and the subtlety of the expression of authority in his face. The other heads, too, are admirable, and grouped finely together, in graceful and easy composition. The various planes of light falling upon them according to their several degrees of distances are well managed. In looking at them attentively and seeking to enter into the scene, one naturally feels with Vasari, who, speaking of this fresco as remarkable above the others, says: "The attention given by the Apostles to what is taking place as they stand around their Master awaiting his determination is expressed with so much truth, and their various attitudes and gestures are so full of animation, that they seem to be those of living men." There is, moreover, great spirit in the figure of Peter as he looks inquiringly towards Jesus, his right arm following the direction of that of his master, which carries the eye to the second moment of the event. 1

The walls of the chapel are very uneven, being full of waves — a result, no doubt, of age.

1 An example of Masaccio's influence upon Raphael may be seen by comparison of this figure of Peter with that in the "Liberation of Peter," on the wall of the Stanza d'Eliodoro of the Vatican.-EDITOR.