Masaccio : A View of Mankind

The Florentine painter Masaccio (1401-1428) was among the early masters of the Italian Renaissance.

In this video, directed by Christopher Burstall, Sir Lawrence Gowing shows how Masaccio's ability to render the human subject in three-dimensional space remains a breakthrough in visual representation.

Masaccio's masterpieces - his paintings for the Carmelite church in Pisa, and the Florentine churches of Santa Maria del Carmine and Santa Maria Novella - are analyzed in terms of their painterly technique and their underlying themes, which reflect the painter's intuition of the nature of human social responsibility and religious imperatives.

His work is set against the background of the cultural flowering of early 15th-century Florence.