Italian Early Renaissance Painter, 1401-1428 was the first great painter of the Quattrocento period of the Italian Renaissance. His frescoes are the earliest monuments of Humanism, and introduce a plasticity previously unseen in figure painting. The name Masaccio is a humorous version of Tommaso, meaning "big", "fat", "clumsy" or "messy" Tom. The name was created to distinguish him from his principal collaborator, also called Tommaso, who came to be known as Masolino ("little/delicate Tom"). Despite his brief career, he had a profound influence on other artists. He was one of the first to use scientific perspective in his painting, employing techniques such as vanishing point in art for the first time. He also moved away from the Gothic style and elaborate ornamentation of artists like Gentile da Fabriano to a more natural mode that employed perspective for greater realism. Masaccio was born to Giovanni di Mone Cassa??i and Jacopa di Martinozzo in Castel San Giovanni di Altura, now San Giovanni Valdarno (now part of the province of Arezzo, Tuscany). His father was a notary and his mother the daughter of an innkeeper of Barberino di Mugello, a town a few miles south of Florence. His family name, Cassai, comes from the trade of his grandfather Simone and granduncle Lorenzo, who were carpenters - cabinet makers ("casse", hence "cassai"). His father died in 1406, when Tommaso was only five; in that year another brother was born, called Giovanni after the dead father. He also was to become a painter, with the nickname of "Scheggia" meaning "splinter". The mother was remarried to an elderly apothecary, Tedesco, who guaranteed Masaccio and his family a comfortable childhood.  Related Paintings of MASACCIO :. | Profile Portrait of a Young Man | The Trinity | Virgin and Child with Saint Anne | Petrus und der Zollner | Holy Trinity, |
Related Artists:
Eugene de Blaas
Austrian Academic Painter, 1843-1931
HUBER, Wolf
German Northern Renaissance Painter, ca.1490-1553
Johann Moritz Rugendas
Augsburg 1802-1858 Weilheim an der Teck,was a German painter, famous for his works depicting landscapes and ethnographic subjects in several countries in the Americas, in the first half of the 19th century. Rugendas was born to the seventh generation of a family of noted painters and engravers of Augsburg (he was a grandson of Georg Philipp Rugendas, 1666-1742, a celebrated painter of battles), and studied drawing and engraving with his father, Johann Lorenz Rugendas II (1775-1826). From 1815 to 1817 he studied with Albrecht Adam (1786-1862), and later in the Academy de Arts of Munich, with Lorenzo Quaglio II (1793-1869). Inspired by the artistic work of Thomas Ender (1793-1875) and the travel accounts in the tropics by Austrian naturalists Johann Baptist von Spix (1781-1826) and Carl von Martius (1794-1868), Rugendas arrived in Brazil in 1821, where he was soon hired as an illustrator for Baron von Langsdorff's scientific expedition to Minas Gerais and Sao Paulo. Langsdorff was the consul-general of the Russian Empire in Brazil and had a farm in the northern region of Rio de Janeiro, where Rugendas went to live with other members of the expedition. In this capacity, Rugendas visited the Serra da Mantiqueira and the historical towns of Barbacena, Sao Joao del Rei, Mariana, Ouro Preto, Caete, Sabara and Santa Luzia.