of their feet; and this manner was persisted in even to his day, not having been fully corrected by the older artists; he it was who (earlier than any other master) brought this point of art to the perfection which it has attained in our own times.
While Masaccio was employed on this work, it chanced that the aforesaid church of the Carmine[1] was consecrated, and in memory of that event Masaccio painted the whole ceremony of the consecration as it had occurred, in chiaroscuro, over the door within the cloister which leads into the convent. In this work, which was in “terra-verde,” the master painted the portraits of a great number of the citizens who make part of the procession, clothed in hoods and mantles; among these figures were those of Filippo di Ser Brunellesco, in “zoccoli,”[2] Donatello, Masolino da Panicale, who had been his master, Antonio Brancacci,[3] for whom it w'as that the above-mentioned chapel was painted, Niccolo da Uzzano, Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, and Bartolommeo Valori, all of whose portraits, painted by the same artist, are also in the house of Simon Corsi, a Florentine gentleman.[4] Masaccio likewise placed the portrait of Lorenzo Ridolfi.[5] who was then ambassador from the Florentine republic to the republic of Venice, among those of the picture of the consecration; and not only did he therein depict the above-named personages from the life, but the door of the convent is also pourtrayed as it stood, with the porter holding the keys in his hand. This work has, of a truth, much in it that is very
- ↑ The church of the Carmine was consecrated on the 19th of April, 1422, by the Archbishop Amerigo Corsini. —Ed. Flor. 1846 -9.
- ↑ Wooden shoes.
- ↑ There were two families of Brancacci in Florence, the one of the Santo Spirito quarter, the other of the quarter of Santa Maria Novella; but this last was more frequently called Del Branca. That Antonio (di Piero di Piuvichese) Brancacci, for whom the chapel so frequently alluded to was painted, belonged to the former.
- ↑ Of these portraits nothing is now known.
- ↑ Lorenzo di Antonio Ridolfi was twice ambassador to Venice; once in 1402, for the arrangement of the Milanese affair, and a second time (which is that here alluded to) in 1425, when he was despatched to Venice with Marcello Strozzi, to form a league between the Venetian Republic and that of Florence, then menaced by Filippo Maria Visconti. But this work could scarcely have been painted by Masaccio after his return from Rome to Florence, if that return took place on the occasion of Cosmo the Elder’s recal from exile, since the last mentioned event did not occur until the year 1434.
