concentrate itself upon some dynamic quality, before we have at all
begun to realise the full material significance of the person before us.
Then what strength to his young men, and what gravity and power to his
old! How quickly a race like this would possess itself of the earth, and
brook no rivals but the forces of nature! Whatever they do--simply
because it is they--is impressive and important, and every movement,
every gesture, is world-changing. Compared with his figures, those in
the same chapel by his precursor, Masolino, are childish, and those by
his follower, Filippino, unconvincing and without significance, because
without tactile values. Even Michelangelo, where he comes in rivalry,
has, for both reality and significance, to take a second place. Compare
his "Expulsion from Paradise" (in the Sixtine Chapel) with the one here
by Masaccio. Michelangelo's figures are more correct, but far less
tangible and less powerful; and while he represents nothing but a man
warding off a blow dealt from a sword, and a woman cringing with ignoble
fear, Masaccio's Adam and Eve stride away from Eden heart-broken with
shame and grief, hearing, perhaps, but not seeing, the angel hovering
high overhead who directs their exiled footsteps.

Masaccio, then, like Giotto a century earlier,--himself the Giotto of an
artistically more propitious world--was, as an artist, a great master of
the significant, and, as a painter, endowed to the highest degree with a
sense of tactile values, and with a skill in rendering them. In a career
of but few years he gave to Florentine painting the direction it pursued
to the end. In many ways he reminds us of the young Bellini. Who knows?
Had he but lived as long, he might have laid the foundation for a
painting not less delightful and far more profound than that of Venice.
As it was, his frescoes at once became, and for as long as there were
real artists among them remained, the training-school of Florentine
painters.