In general color effect these frescoes are strangely unlike their Gothic predecessors. They have nothing of the flower-bed gayety of the Spanish Chapel, of Lorenzo Monaco, or of Masolino elsewhere. The effect is of a very rich smokiness, a kind of monochrome from which only subdued colors emerge. Yellow-browns and silvery grays predominate. There are no hard contours. The relief is salient, but one form blends insensibly into another. The edges of the figures are established not by lines but by contrast of values, the contour is often completely lost. The strong assertion of light and dark in a few structural planes builds out the forms from an investing shadow. Indeed the whole chapel recalls not the Gothic fresco painters, but such far later artists as Velasquez, Rembrandt, or even Whistler. The method of the painter, whoever he was, is completely modern, and uniform throughout the chapel. He sacrifices minute definition to generalizations for mass; and color, to emphatic construction in light and shade. To obtain relief in the figures and distance in the backgrounds is the main concern. It is in intention a luminist art and a modelling art. The procedure is nearly uniform throughout the Brancacci Chapel, though it grows abler from fresco to fresco. It is a method that Masolino never commanded, not at Castiglione d’Olona ten years later, nor still ten years later at San Clemente, Rome. Hence I can only believe that the admitted inequalities in the Brancacci Chapel merely represent the swift development of Masaccio’s genius, and certain interruptions in the work itself.