Die Auferweckung des Sohnes des Theophilus und der thronende heilige Petrus

Around 1427 Florence was watching something new go up on a chapel wall in Santa Maria del Carmine. Masaccio gave his figures real weight and set them in believable space, at a moment when most painters still worked in the flatter, gilded manner of the century before. He never finished it. The older painter Masolino had left for Hungary, and Masaccio himself died about a year later, still in his twenties. The wall stayed incomplete for more than 50 years, until Filippino Lippi came in during the 1480s and painted the missing parts, among them the group of onlookers on the left. Look for the seam and it is there, Lippi's added figures standing beside the ones Masaccio had laid down two generations before.