The Tribute Money

Masaccio painted the Brancacci walls in his early twenties and was dead — possibly poisoned — by twenty-six. For the next hundred years the chapel served as Florence's school: Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Leonardo and the young Michelangelo all came here to draw. (Michelangelo's nose was broken on these premises, by a rival sketcher he mocked.)

The revolution is gravity. Brunelleschi had just codified linear perspective; Masaccio is the first painter to build a whole world on it. The vanishing point sits behind Christ's head, the mountains haze with distance, and — most radically — the light falls from the right, from the direction of the chapel's actual window, so the painted apostles share the room's real sun.

Three moments live in one frame, told by one figure walking through time: at center the tax collector demands and Christ points; at left Peter crouches at the lake, pulling the coin from the fish's mouth; at right Peter pays. Continuous narrative was old; bodies this weighted, cloaked in this much consequence, were not.

Beside it on the chapel's pilaster, his Expulsion from Eden: Adam's face buried in his hands, Eve's head thrown back in an open-mouthed wail. The first painted humans whose shame has mass — and the figures Michelangelo would quote, eighty years later, on the Sistine ceiling.