Masaccio Vs Fresco

Masaccio is a celebrated leading painter of the Italian Renaissance. The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden is one of his frescos. Painted around 1424-27, the fresco rest on the walls of the Florentine Brancacci Chapel. 1 (Fig 1.) It documents how Adam and Eve were evicted from the Garden of Eden. Similar to Masaccio’s Expulsion from the Garden of Eden; Masolino's magnificent Renaissance fresco, Temptation of Adam and Eve, (Fig 2.) is also found in the Brancacci Chapel of the Santa Maria del Carmine Church.2 Both frescos are two of the most representative depictions of Adam and Eve, but Masaccio’s approaches of working on shadow, composition, expressions, color and symbols made his Expulsion from the Garden of Eden more unique at that time.
In The Brancacci Chapel and Masolino, Masaccio, and Filippino Lipp, Austen Henry Layard wrote, Masaccio was born in a town near Florence, now calls San Giovanni Valdarno. He mainly studied those great artwork made by Fra Filippo Lippiand and Donatello in Florence when he was young. 3 Donatello was one of the greatest sculptors at that time; Masaccio must have learned the rules of perspective by study his sculptures. For instance, one of the Donatello’s reliefs was sculpted at the bottom base of the statue of Saint George in Orsanmichele, (Fig 3.) The architecture behind the princess clearly shows the liner perspective. When lights come from an oblique angle, the shadow of Saint George, his horse and dragon all have their shadow shown on the surface. In The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eva are walking beside each other; the liner perspective is shown by their positions in the space. And similar to the architecture behind the princess in the relief, the wall and arch door behind Adam and Eve obviously indicate the liner perspective by the shapes. One side of the architecture is leading liner towards the vanish
Another work painted by him in the same Chapel, The Tribute Money, (Fig 5) all the characters have different postures within different scenes. Viewers can very easily tell the storyline by just looking at the fresco. Naturalism is certainly the key for narrative story to Masaccio, and it helps him to transmit the emotional impact immediately with those realistic postures. Especially back then, not too many people read, thus a visual emotional connection is definitely a better option to inform majority of people what is the meaning of those scenes. On the other hand, Masolino’s Temptation of Adam and Eve is set against a dark background, which was well depicted before, but it had disappeared over the years. The two characters are parallel to each other. They almost display the same gesture and pose. Both of them are looking at opposite direction and showing a three-quarter view of the face. The body languages for the characters in both frescos reflect the understanding of nature human body studies. Accounting to Lilian H. Zirpolo, who wrote in The A to Z of Renaissance Art, Masaccio’s figures show his advanced understanding of human anatomy, while Masolino's Adam and Eve is quite simple in poses, even though he had studied anatomy.6 In this case; notwithstanding, Masolino was skilled with painting human figures, his Adam and Eve could be any nude characters, if there are no other symbols in the painting. It doesn’t truly tell