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| Masaccio Virgin and Child 1426 tempera on panel National Gallery, London |
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| Masaccio Virgin and Child (detail) 1426 tempera on panel National Gallery, London |
"Masaccio was born in Castel San Giovanni (now called San Giovanni Valdarno, province of Arezzo) on 21 December 1401. Already by October of 1418 he was working as a painter and living in Florence. . . . On 7 January 1422 Masaccio, already with his own workshop, enrolled in the Arte dei Medici e Speziali (Guild of doctors and pharmacists, to which painters also belonged). . . . On 23 January 1427 Masaccio was recorded in Pisa, but on July 29 he presented his tax return in Florence. Probably in the same year he frescoed the Trinity with the Virgin, Saint John and pair of donors in the church of Santa Maria Novella, and probably later that year left for Rome, where he began an altarpiece for the Colonna chapel in the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. He only finished one lateral panel and began another before his death. . . . In the tax rolls for Florence in 1429, next to Masaccio's name, which has been crossed out, there is the notation "dicesi è morto a Roma" ("said to have died in Rome"). Since the oldest sources report that he died at twenty-six or twenty-seven years of age, the year of his death is probably 1428. Already his own contemporaries realized the extraordinary importance of Masaccio's contribution to the development of Italian painting. He raised the humanity populating his paintings to a new dignity through the physical concreteness of the forms and the rigorous perspective of the space that surrounds them, offering a standard to be imitated for generations of Florentine artists."
– from biographical notes at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
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| Paolo Uccello Battle of San Romano ca. 1436-40 tempera on panel Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence |
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| attributed to Bicci di Lorenzo The Annunciation 1442 tempera on panel Chiesa della Madonna della Salute e di San Nicolao, Borgo a Buggiano |
"As a young man Bicci was trained in Florence in the well-established workshop of his father, Lorenzo di Bicci, which he probably took over around 1400. . . . Bicci's first dated work is the Porciano triptych of 1414, which testifies to his moderate interest in the innovations that Cherardo Starnina and Lorenzo Monaco introduced to early fifteenth-century Florentine painting, and betrays the strong attachment to traditional compositional formulas of his father's shop. The success of this rather prosaic style, improved by the artist's great technical skill, is demonstrated by a series of prestigious commissions, many of them now lost. . . . During the 1430s Bicci's commissions became even more copious, and the artist, who was gradually breaking free of late Gothic linear rhythms and rich ornamentation, developed more sedate and rationalized compositional schemes. His models at this time appear to be the works of Masolino and Fra Angelico, whose innovations are simplified in his own archaic idiom."
– from biographical notes at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
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| Pesellino Virgin and Child with young St John the Baptist and Angels ca. 1455 tempera on panel Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio |
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| Filippo Lippi The Annunciation ca. 1448-50 tempera on panel National Gallery, London |
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| Filippo Lippi The Annunciation (detail) ca. 1448-50 tempera on panel National Gallery, London |
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| Filippo Lippi Virgin and Child with Two Angels ca. 1460-65 tempera on panel Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence |
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| Filippo Lippi Virgin and Child 1466 tempera on panel Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence |
"Filippo di Tommaso Lippi was probably born in Florence and took his monastic vows there in the convent of the Carmine in 1421. Since he is known to have taken the habit at a very young age – assumed to be about fifteen years – the date of his birth is currently estimated as 1406. He was probably trained as a painter in the convent, at least in part through the formidable visual experience of Masaccio and Masolino's realization of the frescoes in the Brancacci chapel in the church of the Carmine in 1424-25. Indeed, Lippi's earliest probable works, which may be dated to the 1420s, despite their stylistic originality, clearly reflect Masaccio's example in the physical density of bodies and the solidity of perspective construction, as well as in the search for plastic relief and bold foreshortening. . . . By the 1440s Lippi was one of Florence's leading artists, held in high esteem by the Medici family."
– from biographical notes at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
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| Fra Angelico Triptych with The Ascension, The Last Judgment, and Pentecost ca. 1450-55 tempera on panel Palazzo Barberini, Rome |
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| Fra Angelico Christ crowned with Thorns ca. 1438 tempera on panel Duomo di San Francesco a Livorno |
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| Fra Angelico Christ in Glory (central predella panel of the San Domenico Altarpiece, Fiesole) 1423-24 tempera on panel National Gallery, London |
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| Fra Angelico Christ in Glory (left-hand predella panel of the San Domenico Altarpiece, Fiesole) 1423-24 tempera on panel National Gallery, London |
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| Fra Angelico Christ in Glory (right-hand predella panel of the San Domenico Altarpiece, Fiesole) 1423-24 tempera on panel National Gallery, London |
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| Fra Angelico Virgin of Humility ca. 1433-35 tempera on panel Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, Barcelona |