This video has been replaced, please see link below - Masaccio, The Tribute Money

We're in the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine in a chapel within the church, which is called the Brancacci Chapel. It is completely filled with fresco and also a temper painting. And on the left, in the upper register, is a painting by Masaccio. Actually, two paintings. One is the Expulsion from Eden, and to its right is a much larger painting, the Tribute Money. And the chapel is filled with people here to see Masaccio's great masterpiece. Masaccio painted a few of the scenes here of the life of St. Peter, but the rest of the chapel was largely painted by one of his contemporaries, Masolino. But it's Masaccio who we're here to see. So let's talk about the Tribute Money first. It's a pretty complicated scene. It's a story from the New Testament that tells of Christ being confronted by a tax collector who works for Rome. And the problem is that Christ has renounced all worldly possessions. He doesn't have any money to pay. Right. Christ and the apostles have no money to pay the tax collector, who we see here in the center in orange with his back to us. And with a short skirt, unlike the other figures, which were more fully clothed. And Christ and the apostles have halos, and we can identify the tax collector because he doesn't have a halo. And he's making gestures, demanding money. The tax collector is standing in a lovely contrapposto. Some art historians have suggested that that may have been painted from a Roman sculpture. The contrapposto could also have come from Donatello. Absolutely. Christ directs St. Peter to go get money to pay the tax collector from the Sea of Galilee, from the mouth of a fish. So Christ performs a miracle. The apostles will indeed be able to pay the tax collector, because the money will appear in the mouth of a fish that we see St. Peter getting on the far left. And then on the far right, we see St. Peter paying the tax collector. So we've got three different moments of time. In the New Testament, Christ says, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. Render unto God what is God's. In a sense, saying, Caesar minted this money. We can give it back to him. It's not important. What's important is the soul. There is a really specific Florentine context for this. The Florentine government had just initiated a new tax called the Catasto, which was an income tax. I think this was seen by the Florentines as an idea that Christ was condoning that kind of civic responsibility. I'm really interested in how complicated that story is, and yet how clearly Masaccio was able to convey it. Our eye goes not to the left of the scene first, which presumably would be where we would start. We read from left to right, but instead goes to Christ in the center. All of the apostles' attention and the tax collector's attention is on Christ. And so our eyes go to Christ as well. Christ points to Peter, who in turn points almost incredulously to the Sea of Galilee. You want me to go to get the money from where? And that, of course, moves our eye left over to where we see Peter again. We can recognize it's Peter, even though his face is so foreshortened. He's taken off the red garb, presumably not to get it dirty or wet as he kneels. You can see him just opening up the mouth of the fish. I love it. It's so literal. It's very sweet. Masaccio's also separating that scene on the left, so we read it as a separate scene because he's put St. Peter way into the background. And there really is a background. And it's been accomplished in a number of different ways. There's this lovely atmospheric perspective that allows us to move back from mountain to mountain as the sky gets lighter. Masaccio's created a deep illusion of space here. So the figures are really in a very believable landscape, not only the atmospheric perspective, but linear perspective is employed on the right. We can see the orthogonals in the rather classical looking building on the right. In fact, sometimes I've suspected that the only reason that there's a building in this painting at all is because Masaccio is so interested in linear perspective. This is one of the first surviving examples of the employment of linear perspective in a painting. We have the Holy Trinity just a year or so earlier. Christ's head is the vanishing point in his use of linear perspective. So not only is all the attention paid to Christ by his apostles, but the very structure of the painting brings our eye there. So you look at Christ. He looks very calm. You follow his gesture over to St. Peter. And St. Peter looking agitated and annoyed. He does look grumpy, doesn't he? And in disbelief. And then you see this circular gathering of the apostles around them. And you start to register their reactions, some of them looking, ooh, what's going to happen next? Apprehensive. Some of them looking a little bit more calm. But in all of that, Christ remains central and calm in this moment when he performs a miracle. It really is a kind of conversation. It's all this gesturing to tell the story. Really activating the story, absolutely. I love also the contrast between certain apostles. For instance, you're absolutely right. Peter looks like he's angry and is not sure if he should actually be protecting Christ from the tax collector or not. Whereas John, next to him with blonde hair, is such a passive face. It's very calm. So calm. I can't help but think that Masaccio put those faces together in order to achieve the greatest contrast. I think there's no question. I mean, Masaccio is thinking about every possible way he can make this image seem real. And I think that the space to a 15th century viewer looked incredibly realistic. The use of light and shadow really picking up on Giotto's achievement of the previous century, but pushing it forward dramatically. To me, I think the element that adds the greatest realism are those cast shadows on the ground. They're amazing. They're so believable. I mean, you really get a sense of these figures standing in a landscape. The light hitting them from the right, which is, by the way, the same direction as the real light in the chapel. There's a window over to the right. Just over the altar. If you follow those shadows back, if you look down at the ground, they give you an alternation of light and dark that helps establish a foreground and background. I have to say, I'm really taken with the representation of the feet. We talked about the sense of mass and volume in the figures, but all these figures seem so planted. Oh, I love their feet. They're so grounded. If you look, for example, at the left foot of the tax collector, you'll see that the left side of his ankle is in shadow, but the front part of his left foot is in the sunlight. So Masaccio's paying such careful attention to light and shadow. And look at those foreshortened halos that Masaccio has employed so that they're not those flat gold circles that we see. Well, they're foreshortened, just like Peter's face on the left of the painting. Right, except a halo isn't a real thing. So in a sense, taking this symbol of spirituality and treating it as if it was a solid in the world. It is this funny moment in the 15th century when the symbolic traditions of representation that have been handed down from the medieval are coming into contact with a kind of naturalistic facility and an interest in naturalism. And so you get those very funny relationships. So Masaccio really is giving us a masterpiece of illusionism, of the illusion of space, of the illusion of volume. To me, the figures are just fully human in the way that I think about Donatello's figures or San Michele. They have psychological depth. What is it about the Florentine culture that is allowing for this kind of fully human expression? This is one of the great centers of humanism is looking back to classicism. And certainly, we see that in a number of direct ways. But more than that, it's this ennobling of the human experience that I think is so central to the license that Masaccio is taking here.