Masolino da Panicale: A Neglected Innovator of Renaissance Perspective

The painter Masaccio has received the lion’s share of the credit for developing the basic perspective construction that dominated the painting style of the Early-to-High Renaissance period, based on the geometric insights of the architect Filippo Brunelleschi and the mathematician Paolo Toscanelli. Close examination of the artworks of the period reveal that this misapprehension was based on a critical misattribution of many of the works supporting his claim from their true author, Masolino da Panicale. The two artists are well established as working closely together, with Masolino being the senior by 18 years. But Giorgio Vasari, whose ‘Lives of the Artists’ is the sole source for most of our knowledge of Renaissance painters, attributed the entire Brancacci Chapel works to Masaccio (with some finished by Filippino Lippi), while listing its profound influence on two dozen of the most famous painters of the Renaissance. Indeed, art historians have developed the notion that Masaccio not only taught perspective to his older collaborator, but “must have” provided the sketches for works painted by Masolino after his (Masaccio’s) early death. A review of the current attributions of several of the Brancacci and other works to Masolino, and an analysis of the accuracy and consistency of the perspective construction in them, in comparison with the relative inconsistency of the actual Masaccio examples, leads to a reversal of the canard that the younger artist played a dominant role, indicates in fact that Masolino was the true master of accurate perspective for three-dimensional compositions, and that it was his array of strikingly original spatial constructions that influenced artists for the rest of the fifteenth century. These included not only the classic central one-point construction, but extreme examples of shifted one-point and even accurate two-point perspective. This impressive analytic capability is contrasted with the demonstrably intuitive approach to perspective construction by an array of contemporaries who have variously been proposed as key figures in the introduction of geometric perspective.