A twinge of anxiety stiffened his stride, though not at the chaos unfolding around him. He knew the city intimately, but only from books. What if he was disappointed? What if Florence's "unique cultural and artistic heritage," which he'd detailed in his essays with such hollow authority, left him cold? As if on cue, he found himself on a bridge spanning the River Arno—no lively, sparkling torrent, but a strip of brown and turbid water, a river fit for a factory district.
Five minutes later he reached his destination, and his apprehension melted away. The Brancacci Chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine was deserted when he entered it, and it remained so for the next quarter of an hour. Michelangelo and Raphael had both come here to study, to copy, to learn from the young man who had changed the face of European painting: Tom-maso Guidi, nicknamed Masaccio by his friends, the scruffy boy- wonder, dead at twenty-seven but who had left his defining mark on these walls long before. Others had contributed to the same cycle of frescoes—Masolino, Fra Lippo Lippi, names to be reckoned with—but their work was flat, lifeless, when set alongside that of Masaccio.
His figures demanded to be heard, to be believed in; some even threatened to step out of the walls and shake the doubters into credence. Real men, not ciphers. And real women. His depiction of Adam and Eve's expulsion from the Garden of Eden required no context in order to be appreciated. More than five hundred years on, it still struck home: the fallen couple, with their bare, rough- hewn limbs, granite hard from toil, cast out like country laborers by some unforgiving landlord.