What is Masaccio best known for?

verifiedCite
While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions.
Select Citation Style
Feedback
Corrections? Updates? Omissions? Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login).
Thank you for your feedback

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

External Websites

Masaccio was an important Florentine painter of the Early Renaissance, who was especially known for his influential frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel, Florence. Tribute Money is perhaps the most famous of these. Its solid, anatomically convincing figures are set in a clear, controlled space lit by a consistent fall of light. In this way Masaccio decisively broke with the Middle Ages and their conception of a picture as a world governed by different and arbitrary physical laws. Instead, he embraced the concept of a painting as a window behind which a continuation of the real world is to be found, with the same laws of space, light, form, and perspective that obtain in reality.