Video No. 6000. English Language Pal VHS.
An Exploration of Art on Film.
'A View Of Mankind'.
Produced by Christopher Burstall.
The Florentine painter Masaccio (1401-28) was among the most innovatory and influential of the earlier masters of the Italian Renaissance. His seriousness in the depiction of realistically observed people in convincing situations truck an entirely new note and, as Sir Lawrence Gowing shows in this film, Masaccio's ability to render the human subject in three-dimensional space remains one of the great breakthroughs in the history of visual representation.
From the outset, Masaccio was clearly the successor to Giotto - the first major artist of the European painting tradition - and the simple grandeur of his early triptych for the church at San Giovenale is vividly contrasted to the prevailing spirit of European Gothic art. Masaccio's masterpieces - his paintings for the Carmelite church in Pisa, and in the Florentine churches of Santa Maria del Carmine and Santa Maria Novella - are closely analysed in terms of both their painterly technique and their underlying themes, which reflect Masaccio's deep intuition of the nature of human social responsibility and religious imperatives.
His work is set against the background of the hot-house cultural flowering of early 15th century Florence, which aimed to outdo all other Italian cities in its artistic achievements. Masaccio is seen throughout as a painter whose technical mastery served a passionate realism devoid of idealising or decorative elements - a view that puts him at the heart of any debate about the purpose and potential of great art.
