Since the sixteenth century, historians have credited Masaccio—along with Filippo Brunelleschi and Donatello—with changing the course of Western art. Indeed, Masaccio’s legacy is endlessly fascinating yet highly problematic. A medieval artist at the threshold of the Renaissance, he produced works both extraordinarily innovative and exceptionally traditional.

The Cambridge Companion to Masaccio, with ten essays by eminent scholars and conservators, confronts this legacy head-on, making a sophisticated and substantial contribution to the field. The Companion, writes editor Diane Cole Ahl, “seeks to situate Masaccio’s career and contributions within the experiential and artistic worlds of early Renaissance Florence. Rather than isolating the master because of his genius, it endeavors to integrate his achievements into the milieu from which he emerged” (8).

Embracing a variety of approaches, the volume’s essays seemingly lack any organizational structure. Anthony Molho’s brilliant contribution to the collection, “Masaccio’s Florence in Perspective: Crisis and Discipline in a Medieval Society,” reexamines the social history of Florence (1378–1434) to counter Hans Baron’s optimistic portrayal of it as an “enlightened” republic. Molho relies on economic and political facts to restore an urban landscape of “light and darkness” (16–17) in which the ruling merchant class struggled to define itself in humanistic terms while preserving its hegemony, despite recurring plagues, warfare, civil strife, an increasingly inequitable distribution of wealth encouraged by deficit financing, and the threat of economic collapse. Florence, Molho shows, was a city where the classical ideology of collective welfare and Christian charity clashed with power politics and capitalism’s ethos of individual gain. Given today’s political climate, Molho’s explanation of how the ruling class survived by exerting its control over—and intervening ever more actively in—the lives of its citizens (thus setting the stage for the Medici oligarchy) seems even more profound.

Gary Radke’s “Masaccio’s City: Urbanism, Architecture, and Sculpture in Early Fifteenth-Century Florence” reminds us that Brunelleschi, Donatello, and Masaccio (who “put all of their ideas—and more—into paint,” 40) inhabited a late-Gothic environment. Radke’s analysis of sculptural styles at Orsanmichele is a powerful counterpoint to the claims of Baron and Frederick Hartt, who saw the Renaissance style as an expression of “civic humanism” embodied in the free, capitalist republic. Style instead depended on subject matter, niche location, and guild politics; sculptors thus “adjusted their works as the context demanded” (63).

The late Ellen Callmann’s contribution, “Painting in Masaccio’s Florence,” adeptly situates the artist in the stylistic ambience of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Most intriguing is Callmann’s proposal for a “Carmine house style” (80); such a “Carmine style of imaging” was first suggested by Megan Holmes (Fra Filippo Lippi the Carmelite Painter [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999], 57). Still, a number of Callmann’s points rest uneasily on circumstantial evidence (for example, placing Masaccio in the shop of Bicci di Lorenzo) and problematic sources such as Giorgio Vasari (whose distant testimony Callmann uses to support her claim that “Masaccio was famous for his portraits,” 69). Indeed, the near-silence of writers of the time suggests that Masaccio was anything but famous.

Perri Lee Roberts’s “Collaboration in Early Renaissance Art: The Case of Masaccio and Masolino” expertly considers this association alongside similar but temporary relationships that reduced costs and minimized financial risk. Stylistic and technical data indicate that these artists collaborated on at least three major works—the Sant’Anna Metterza altarpiece, the Brancacci Chapel frescoes, and the Santa Maria Maggiore (Rome) altarpiece—between April 1424 (after the dissolution of Masolino’s partnership with Francesco d’Antonio) and September 1425 (when Masolino departed for Hungary), and again between mid-1427 (when Masolino returned) and June 1428 (when Masaccio died). Masaccio may also have executed two lost frescoes in Santa Maria del Carmine—a Saint Paul and the Sagra (depicting the church’s consecration)—within this collaboration. Discarding the connoisseurial preference to seek the hands of individual masters in these works, Roberts insightfully explains the convergence and divergence of Masolino and Masaccio’s individual styles during and after their joint ventures.

The essay “Masaccio: Technique in Context,” by Roberto Bellucci and Cecilia Frosinini, gives the conservators’ perspective on the artist’s formation, his reception of Masolino’s techniques, and a chronology of Masaccio’s work. Their claim that his development “cannot be explained other than by a sort of ‘apprenticeship’ with Filippo Brunelleschi” (113) is interesting albeit thinly supported. Still, the authors’ technical analyses are intriguing and reveal practices associated with manuscript illumination. The authors convincingly enlarge the extent of Masaccio’s participation in the Santa Maria Maggiore altarpiece.

Dillian Gordon’s “The Altarpieces of Masaccio” presents a brilliant technical, iconographical, and contextual analysis of Masaccio’s four extant altarpieces: Cascia di Reggello (dated April 23, 1422), Pisa (documented 1426), Sant’Anna Metterza, and Santa Maria Maggiore. Gordon rejects the theory that Masaccio studied with Bicci di Lorenzo, postulating instead “an intimate knowledge of the work of Donatello” (125) and noting that the Cascia di Reggello altarpiece borrowed a motif directly from Donatello’s not-yet-cast Orsanmichele Saint Louis of Toulouse.

Gordon’s suggestion merits elaboration, and her subtle but inspirational notion brought forth thoughts that have long stirred within my own mind. On stylistic grounds alone, one might speculate that Masaccio worked under Donatello prior to 1422. As Bellucci and Frosinini note, cassone makers (a trade practiced by Masaccio’s family) associated with both painters and sculptors. Masaccio’s working life falls neatly into four periods, and the first three evince a continuing association with Donatello: Between January 1422 and April 1424, the Cascia di Reggello borrowing indicates an early and close association with Donatello. Between April 1424 and August 1425, Masaccio and Masolino probably collaborated on the Brancacci Chapel frescoes and, perhaps, on other Carmine projects. Masolino is documented there in May 1425, and if the relief The Ascension with Christ Giving the Keys to St. Peter (London, Victoria and Albert Museum) is indicative, Donatello may have worked at the Carmine at this time, perhaps even for Filippo Brancacci. In such a capacity, Donatello (as senior artist) might have been instrumental in securing a Carmine commission for Masaccio. From September 1425 to mid-1427 we find further connections with Donatello. Donatello received one payment on Masaccio’s behalf (July 1426) and witnessed another (December 1426) for the Pisa altarpiece. At this time, Donatello and Michelozzo were working in Pisa on the Cardinal Rainaldo Brancacci funerary monument. The architectural framework of the Trinity—presumably executed in early 1427 if it depicts Lenzi patrons—is closely based on three contemporary works by Donatello and Michelozzo: the Guelph Party niche at Orsanmichele (1425), as well as the Brancacci and Coscia funerary monuments that were “in process.” Finally, between Masolino’s return in mid-1427 and Masaccio’s death in Rome in June 1428, the two artists were in Rome, yet not necessarily without a connection to Donatello. Cardinal Rainaldo—as archpriest of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome—could have played a role (before his death in June 1426) in what Gordon convincingly argues was a papal commission for his church’s double-sided altarpiece executed by Masaccio and Masolino. (Although from Naples, Cardinal Brancacci was related to the Florentine Brancacci and had resided with them from early 1419 until mid-1420 as part of Pope Martin V’s entourage.)

Cole Ahl’s own contribution to the volume, “Masaccio in the Brancacci Chapel,” is an insightful analysis that places the chapel within the society around it, and situates it in terms of its history, patronage, and iconography. Most significantly, she considers the frescoes’ iconography within the chapel’s funerary context—as a commemoration of the patron saint of the chapel’s founder, Piero di Piuvichese Brancacci—rather than as contemporary political statements.

Timothy Verdon’s “Masaccio’s Trinity: Theological, Social, and Civic Meanings,” presents another interpretive framework for one of art history’s most ambiguous, problematic, and—consequently—most discussed images (cf., for example, Rona Goffen, ed., Masaccio’s Trinity New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998]; see Perry Lee Robert’s review in CAA.Reviews). Among Masaccio’s surviving works, none is more emblematic of the nascent atmosphere of early-fifteenth-century Florence than the Trinity, which fuses a heroic figural canon, naturalistic illumination, classical architectural forms, and centric-point perspective to create the first extant illusion of “real” pictorial space behind the surface plane. Relying on numerous textual sources, including Dominican sermons from Santa Maria Novella, Verdon reads the Trinity as a symbol of the divine family and an archetype for the human family. While illuminating and insightful, the essay is somewhat unsatisfying because it reads like another attempt to find texts that explain the Trinity while tending to neglect the broader experience of the image itself.

J. V. Field’s “Masaccio and Perspective in Italy in the Fifteenth Century,” presents a thorough analysis of Masaccio’s geometry—especially in the Trinity—as well as an impressive study of the reception and theory of centric-point perspective in the quattrocento. Field repeatedly draws our attention to artists—Donatello, Paolo Uccello, Piero della Francesca, Andrea Mantegna—who understood perspective theory but willingly broke the rules for other reasons, for example, to enhance the visual effect of an image. A common result was an “unrealistically short viewing distance” (194), which could imply that painters were not as concerned about mathematically “fixing” the viewer in real space as we think.

Francis Ames-Lewis’s contribution, “Masaccio’s Legacy,” presents a masterful survey of Masaccio’s critical reception from 1430 until Vasari’s 1568 edition of the Lives, where we find Masaccio’s “modern” legacy fully developed. Despite Vasari’s heroic image of the artist, it is surprising that so little was written about him during or immediately after his lifetime, and this makes Alberti’s very brief reference to him (in the vernacular Della Pittura of 1436) so much more interesting and problematic.

If this book has any significant flaw, it is the variable quality and overall lack of illustrations. Reproductions of Masaccio’s complete oeuvre are wanting, and the contributions of Radke, Callmann, and Gordon suffer particularly from a lack of comparative illustrations. In one case, Radke’s attempt to describe and locate the architectural prototype for the Trinity in Brunelleschi’s Barbadori Chapel (Santa Felicità, Florence) is contradicted by the illustration. This criticism aside, the interdisciplinary approach of The Cambridge Companion to Masaccio sets a high standard for similar art-historical studies. It is quite likely to be a standard reference for many years to come.