In this same year, it is likely that he painted the frescoes in the Collegiate Church at Castiglione d’Olona, a lovely village at the foot of the Alps. Masolino had to deal with refractory spaces, the narrow triangular sectors of the apse. This has caused elongation of the figures and piling up of fantastic architecture merely to fill the spaces. The mood is gentle and graceful, the treatment quite Gothic. These six stories of the Virgin must have satisfied Masolino’s humanist patron, Cardinal Branda Castiglione; for several years later he re-employed the painter to decorate the adjoining Baptistery. Masolino at forty, in the Collegiate Church, was still completely Gothic. If we may believe Vasari, at that age he suddenly mastered the new style. Only on such a theory can he have painted the Adam and Eve and the St. Peter reviving Tabitha, in the Brancacci Chapel, which are in the new chiaroscuro technic. Since Masolino, years after the time when he was working in that chapel, is still incompletely modern as regards light and shade, it is easier to suppose that what he actually painted in the Brancacci Chapel, about 1424, was merely the vault and the three lunettes, which have since been destroyed. Thus all the frescoes now visible in this famous chapel would be by Masaccio or his continuer, Filippino Lippi. Such was the view of the excellent critic Cavalcaselle more than fifty years ago. However that be, Masolino by 1427 was at Buda (now Budapest), where he worked for that extraordinary Florentine exile and soldier of fortune, Pippo Spano. After that trip, we hear no more of Masolino at Florence—rather oddly, since the Brancacci Chapel, which he had begun, still had three unpictured spaces after Masaccio’s death in 1428. Apparently the Brancacci family did not consider Masolino competent to complete the work he had begun. If so, they were wise. [Illustration: FIG. 82. Masolino. Baptism of Christ, detail of fresco.—_Baptistery, Castiglione d’Olona._ ]