The Keystone · Masaccio, c. 1425
The Tribute Money
Masaccio was in his early twenties when he painted the Brancacci walls, and dead at twenty-six — yet every Florentine painter for a century, Michelangelo included, came here to copy him.
The revolution is gravity. A single vanishing point sits behind Christ's head; light enters from the direction of the chapel's real window; and the apostles stand on the ground like men who weigh something. Three moments of the story share one frame — the tax demanded, the coin found in the fish, the coin paid.
Across the pilaster, his Expulsion from Eden: Adam covering his face, Eve's open-mouthed wail — shame given a body for the first time in Western painting.