The year 2000 marked the six-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Tommaso di ser Giovanni di Mone Cassai, best-known to the world as the early-Renaissance Florentine master-painter, Masaccio (the nickname translates variously as "Ugly," "Rough," or "Careless" Tom). As Francis Ames-Lewis argues in the final essay of this volume, the combination of praise of Masaccio by his contemporaries and the later (sixteenth-century) biography by Giorgio Vasari have guaranteed Masaccio's reputation ever since. While not as well known to the public at large as Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo Buonarroti, specialists and cognoscenti unfailingly include Masaccio in the pantheon of artistic heroes whose name is automatically associated with the Florentine Renaissance.
The Cambridge Companion to Masaccio, sensitively edited by Diane Cole Ahl, seeks to balance critical acknowledgement of Masaccio's epoch-making achievements with the need "to situate Masaccio's career and contributions within the experiential and artistic worlds of early Renaissance Florence" (8). In this reviewer's opinion, the volume succeeds in its aim, and is balanced in another sense: it is both a primer for university students and an exemplum of recent advances and discoveries in Masaccio studies, a field which has enjoyed its own Renaissance since the late 1990s.
The lack of coherence that afflicts so many volumes of collected essays is not a feature of this volume. Indeed, reading the essays from start to finish is an unexpectedly satisfying experience because the unavoidable necessity for individual contributors to exploit the same limited archival and visual sources on Masaccio has been turned into a virtue. Masaccio's obscure origins in the Tuscan town of San Giovanni Valdarno, his virtually unknown early career, and his equally shadowy first contact with Florence--to take one example--are addressed by several contributors, but one is struck by the way that each uses the material to create subtly different insights, and not by any sense of mechanical repetition.
Ahl's introduction is followed by Anthony Molho's opening essay on the economic polarization and political tension prevailing in Florence in Masaccio's lifetime. Molho's portrait of a society threatened by economic polarization, incipient rebellion, continuous war, galloping public debt, and other pressures borders on the Manichaean, but it is nonetheless a compelling synthesis, and it sits well with Gary Radke's deceptively simple essay on "Masaccio's City." Radke emphasises the "Medieval" character of early fifteenth-century Florence rather than its Renaissance "modernity." He echoes Molho's comments on the narrowness of the Florentine political elite, but his most important points concern Masaccio's "envisioning" of the city, and help establish one of the volume's major underlying themes, which is that Masaccio needs to be analyzed within the plethora of competing associations that dominated late-medieval society, and not simply in terms of his status as a watershed in the stream of western artistic style.
When Ellen Callmann asserts that patrons of a second-rung artist like Neri di Bicci must have "lacked creative imagination" (66), I felt that her essay ("Painting in Masaccio's Florence") came dangerously close to anachronism. It is also underpinned by a rather linear conception of artistic progress. Like the other contributions, however, it has the merit of compensating for the archival poverty of the historical record by using better-documented masters to create a contextual space in which Masaccio's own work--and even his likely intentions--may be read. Such an approach risks over-generalization, but the paucity of sources means that there is simply no alternative with Masaccio; the benefit, however, exemplified in this volume, is that the specialized interests of individual contributors are fashioned into a text that is accessible both to undergraduate students and professional scholars.
Perri-Lee Roberts' essay on Masolino (which follows Callmann's) is the most focused to this point, and her sophisticated discussion of the likely collaboration of Masaccio and Masolino on the Santa Maria Maggiore (Rome) polyptych is an important contribution. In tune with Ahl's obvious desire for overall coherence, it also functions as an effective entree to the outstanding piece by Cecilia Frosinini and Roberto Bellucci. Their blending of technical, scientific analysis with more conventional art-historical approaches is a tour de force that both complements Roberts' discussion of the artists' partnership and makes clear the potential for further advances in understanding where, a decade ago, there might seem to have been none.
Dillian Gordon's essay analyzes Masaccio's altarpieces, and provides the necessary systematic treatment of his so-called Pisa Altarpiece, executed for the notary, ser Giuliano di Colino degli Scarsi. Gordon's essay would look less conventional if it did not follow that by Frosinini/Bellucci: it contains a number of the more incremental advances in knowledge that--infrared reflectography aside--most of us must be content to make.
Ahl's own chapter on Masaccio's contribution to the fresco-cycle of the Brancacci Chapel is refreshing in that it makes a frontal assault on the tenacious myth in which the figure of Masaccio is enveloped. Ahl acknowledges recent advances in study of the Brancacci Chapel facilitated by its restoration in the 1980s and by other developments, and she rightly insists on seeing the chapel within the broader culture of the Carmelite church in which it is housed. Ahl's purpose is not to deny Masaccio's greatness, but to integrate understanding of the artist with knowledge of the wider society, which as already signaled is the larger purpose of the volume as a whole.
Timothy Verdon's essay on Masaccio's famous Trinity in the Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence is one of the most original in this collection. Verdon's intention is to analyze, in his words, the "highly developed Dominican ecclesiology [that] probably determined the ... program of which Masaccio's fresco was the focus" (168). We shall probably not have more documents on Masaccio in the future, and refining our understanding of his oeuvre will therefore be forced to rely on the subtlety with which scholars can weave existing sources. Verdon's essay is a model in this respect: he construes the Trinity as the spiritual and physical objective of a journey that began in the city itself, and culminated in the nave of Santa Maria Novella.
Ahl has located J.V. Field's essay, "Masaccio and Perspective in the Fifteenth Century," directly after Verdon's, quietly reminding the reader of a contemporary perceptual framework that regarded the mathematical and geometrical properties of art as related aspects of the same spiritual enterprise. At the same time, in demonstrating that mathematical perspective was only one weapon in the armory of the early Renaissance artist, Field's essay may be read with those by Molho, Radke, Frosinini/Bellucci and Ahl as a corrective to tenacious notions about the early Renaissance as an objective historical period.
The final essay by Francis Ames-Lewis, referred to above, is characteristic of this scholar's versatility in its integrated analysis of social history, the literary record, and painterly style. Ames-Lewis's argument is thought-provoking on several issues, including those concerning the nature of Masaccio's reputation during his own lifetime and immediately after his death, the various criteria that may have shaped contemporary opinion about the innovation of his work, and the process by which the foundations of his later fame were laid.
The Cambridge Companion to Masaccio does not pretend to address, let alone to exhaust, its vast topic. Marred only by the disappointing quality of its illustrations, this is an indispensable book for scholars particularly concerned with Renaissance art and culture, and contains a great deal of important material for historians of European art.