Masaccio

Masaccio (1401–1428), born Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Simone, came from Castel San Giovanni, now San Giovanni Valdarno. Nothing is known of his training; he joined the Florentine painters' guild as an independent master in 1422. In Florence he studied Giotto and befriended Brunelleschi and Donatello, and he worked alongside the older painter Masolino, whose nickname, little Tom, his own, clumsy Tom, may have been coined to distinguish. From around 1425 the two painted the frescoes of the Brancacci Chapel in Santa Maria del Carmine, where in The Tribute Money the shadows fall away from the chapel's real window, as if the figures were lit by it. His Holy Trinity in Santa Maria Novella is the earliest surviving painting to use systematic linear perspective. He died in Rome at twenty-six, and according to Vasari the leading painters who followed him, Leonardo and Michelangelo among them, studied his work in the Brancacci Chapel. Here: The Holy Trinity and The Tribute Money.