Masaccio to deal with actual life, to grapple to their souls the
visible forms of humanity, and to reproduce the types afterwards in
new, vivid, breathing combinations of dignity and intelligent action,
must have had an immense effect upon the course of Art. To judge by
the few and somewhat injured specimens of these masters which are
accessible, it is obvious that they had much more to do in forming the
great schools of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, than a painter
of such delicate, but limited genius as that of Fra Angelico could
possibly have. Certainly, the courage and accuracy exhibited in the
nude forms of Adam and Eve expelled from paradise, and the expressive
grace in the group of Saint Paul conversing with Saint Peter in
prison, where so much knowledge and power of action are combined with
so much beauty, all show an immense advance over the best works of the
preceding three quarters of a century.

Besides the great intrinsic merits of these paintings, the Brancacci
chapel is especially interesting from the direct and unquestionable
effect which it is known to have had upon younger painters. Here
Raphael and Michel Angelo, in their youth, and Benvenuto Cellini
passed many hours, copying and recopying what were then the first
masterpieces of painting, the traces of which study are distinctly
visible in their later productions; and here, too, according to
Cellini, the famous punch in the nose befell Buonarotti, by which his
well-known physiognomy acquired its marked peculiarity. Torregiani,
painter and sculptor of secondary importance, but a bully of the first
class,--a man who was in the habit of knocking about the artists whom
he could not equal, and of breaking both their models and their
heads,--had been accustomed to copy in the Brancacci chapel, among the
rest. He had been much annoyed, according to his own account, by
Michel Angelo's habit of laughing at the efforts of artists inferior