Befreiung des heiligen Petrus

This wall stood unfinished for about 50 years. Masaccio began painting the Brancacci Chapel in the 1420s and died in his twenties before the cycle was done, and soon after the family who paid for it fell out of favour and was exiled from Florence. When the Brancacci came back around 1480 they hired Filippino Lippi to complete it. Here an angel leads Saint Peter out of his cell while the guard sleeps against the doorframe, noticing nothing. What still surprises visitors is how closely Filippino, working a full generation later, matched the dead master's manner, so that the eye struggles to find the seam where one hand ends and the other begins. Filippino was the son of Fra Filippo Lippi, a friar and painter Masaccio himself had once influenced.