Bartloser Karmeliterheiliger

This small panel, only about 38 centimeters high, is a fragment of one of the landmark commissions of early Renaissance painting. In February 1426 a Pisan notary paid Masaccio 80 florins for a large multi-panel altarpiece for his family chapel in the Carmine church in Pisa. The saint here, tonsured and beardless, wears the white mantle of the Carmelite order that ran the church. Masaccio was giving these holy figures real weight and shadow, standing in believable space, at a time when most altar saints still floated flat against a field of gold. The altarpiece was taken apart and scattered in the 18th century, and this piece, with several of its companions, ended up in Berlin. Masaccio himself died in 1428, only about 27 years old.