Ten of the Greatest ; Painters Who Changed the World of Art Live for Lists

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1 MASACCIO 1401-1428

His nickname meaning 'Big Tom' or 'Clumsy Tom' (his real name, Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Mone Cassai, is remembered by no one), Masaccio died in 1428 aged only 26 while working on the Brancacci Chapel frescoes of the life of St Peter, including The Baptism Of The Neophytes (above). They were so astonishing in their realism, characterisation and communication of form, activity and emotion, that the chapel served as something of a school for later generations of Florentine painters, and to Vasari, the painter- historian, Masaccio was the founder of painting in Florence. Traces of his influence are evident in the work of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael at the end of the 15th century. Even now, six centuries on, the realism of his nude Adam and Eve, and of the shivering boy waiting for baptism, his command of form, movement and character in grave and monumental figures fully-clothed, and his observation of architecture and landscape, all astonish us.

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Ten of the Greatest ; Painters Who Changed the World of Art Live for Lists

The Baptism Of The Neophytes The figure of St Peter is monumental, as rounded as a sculpture, the real light of the chapel window seeming to fall on his back. Three converts to Christianity are to be baptised: one kneels in the shallow water of the River Jordan, the second shivers on the bank, the third is tugging off his clothes. In the Renaissance this is the earliest evidence of such realism in painting the nude from a live model.

2 LEONARDO DA VINCI 1452-1519

The next great innovator. As a sculptor, architect, engineer, mathematician and scientist this 'universal genius' bequeathed only notebooks and drawings t...

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