Masaccio

[mah-saht-chaw, muh-sah-chee-oh]

noun

1. Tommaso Guidi, 1401–28?, Italian painter.

Masaccio

/ maˈzattʃo /

noun

1. original name Tommaso Guidi. 1401–28, Florentine painter. He was the first to apply to painting the laws of perspective discovered by Brunelleschi. His chief work is the frescoes in the Brancacci chapel in the church of Sta. Maria del Carmine, Florence

Example Sentences

A disgruntled reader had written a letter to the editor slamming the publication for reproducing the Italian Renaissance artist Masaccio’s famous painting of Adam and Eve without including the fig leaves that church officials later added to cover their genitals.

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Posted to Italy with a unit that made road signs and illustrations for training materials, he spent his free time in Florence looking at the Renaissance art in the Pitti Palace and the Masaccio frescoes in the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine.

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I spent three hours at the early Renaissance basilica of Santa Maria Novella, where Masaccio’s centuries-old “Holy Trinity” fresco is celebrated for its experiments with perspective.

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Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Masaccio and Leon Battista Alberti were establishing the rules of perspective.

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Masaccio again makes you think about the relations between Renaissance art and sculpture; his great innovations included the heavy sculptural presence of the bodies he painted, and also the first use of vanishing point perspective; the literary historian Stephen Greenblatt in “The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve,” writes: “Masaccio’s unforgettable figures depend … on their overwhelming sense of embodiment, an illusion of actuality conjured up by perspective and heightened by the shadows … ”

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