Masaccio Paints the Brancacci Chapel

1425

A twenty-four-year-old Tuscan named Tommaso Cassai began frescoing a side chapel in Florence's Santa Maria del Carmine. His figures cast shadows; Adam and Eve wept with real anguish. Young painters, including a boy named Michelangelo, would later climb the scaffolding to study them as if the future lived there. His single-point perspective and naturalistic lighting transformed flat medieval fresco into convincing three-dimensional space, inventing Renaissance visual language.