She resembled what she had been, in the same degree that a virgin by
Masaccio, resembles a virgin of Raphael,--weaker, thinner, more delicate.
Brunelleschi was a close friend of Donatello and the painter
Masaccio (1401-1428).
One important early example is The Expulsion from the Garden (1526), by
Masaccio. Banished from paradise, Eve throws her head back in despair, covering her body in shame.
The Blue Tower may be seen as a painter's palette with endless possibilities of semantic overflows and associative explosion, which reminds the reader of neoclassical (
Masaccio) and modern art (Giacometti).
"I'd noticed it before - first, in
Masaccio's fresco of Adam and Eve in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence (are you impressed yet by my shameless name-dropping?) and then in Durer's etching of them and in paintings by Lucas Cranach.
In Tuscan sunlight
Masaccio painted his belief that St.
She must have felt like
Masaccio, strolling with Alberti, opining how a spot on the horizon was not an endpoint but a marker of infinite space.
For the first time the reader was invited to participate in the historically remote everyday by a process of bodily triangulation: We would feel with our bodies, and see with our embodied eyes, what the beholders of
Masaccio and Filippo Lippi saw.
An interesting aspect of Masolino and
Masaccio's collaboration, briefly commented on here by Frosinini, but discussed by the author in greater detail elsewhere, is that prior to working on the Brancacci Chapel they collaborated on the Carnesecchi altarpiece in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Florence--with Uccello also, according to a number of sixteenth-century sources.
"I have been moved and influenced in particular by the frescoes by the Italian Renaissance master
Masaccio."
Contemporary criticism has finally recognized this aspect of Gentile's art as having a great deal in common with
Masaccio, that perennial hero of the "real" Renaissance.