In 1428, being only twenty-six years old, Masaccio drops out of sight at Rome. Some report that he was poisoned, others that he was slain in a street brawl. We really know nothing about it. What we do know is that in the recorded history of art no painter had achieved so greatly in so short a time. Within six short years Masaccio created that method of painting which stood uncontested till the advent of luminism only forty years ago. And he not merely illustrated the method of construction in light and dark, painting in atmospheric values rather than in lines and charted areas, but he also expressed in the new technic both the noblest traditional emotions as also poignant new emotions quite his own. In one superb aggressive he had moved three generations into the future. For a hundred years the most intelligent and ambitious artists in Florence as a matter of course studied and copied in the Brancacci Chapel to form their style. Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Andrea del Sarto thus paid homage to the untidy youth from Castel San Giovanni, and even the iconoclasts of today, for whom Leonardo da Vinci and his peers are scarcely artists at all, envy the gravity and force of Masaccio. He is the real father of modern painting, which is most true to itself when it tempers an ardent curiosity as regards natural appearances with a respect for the great traditions of moderation and taste. Masaccio’s successors, very wisely, did not closely imitate him. They saw he was an unsafe and unapproachable model. By a swift impulse of genius, and apparently without analytical study of anatomy and topography, he had mastered the broad effects that register form. Details he neglected. He gives the action of hands and feet, not their articulations, the scale of landscape and not its component parts. For men of lesser genius, these short-cuts were dangerous. While using Masaccio as inspiration, they had to verify his discoveries through analytical studies before those innovations could become generally available. The process of verification and minute research occupied about fifty years and may be said to be complete with the maturity of Leonardo da Vinci, say about the date of The Last Supper, 1498. The successors of Masaccio may be divided into two groups as they quietly adopted and popularized the immediately available part of his discoveries, or strenuously carried his work forward. To the moderate progressive group belong Fra Filippo Lippi and Benozzo Gozzoli, and still later Ghirlandaio; the experimentalists are birds of quite a different feather.