The story
Adam and Eve leave Eden on the left pillar at the entrance to the Brancacci Chapel, Eve howling, Adam's face buried in his hands. Masaccio painted them in the mid-1420s, in his early twenties. For about three centuries they wore sprigs of leaves added to cover their nakedness, removed only in the restoration finished in 1990, together with the candle soot that had darkened the walls.
The chapel is part of the church of Santa Maria del Carmine, across the Arno in Florence. The silk merchant Felice Brancacci paid for scenes from the life of Saint Peter, shared between the older painter Masolino and Masaccio. In the Tribute Money, on the upper left wall, Christ and the apostles stand in a ring of solid, sculptural figures, while Peter appears twice more at the sides, pulling a coin from a fish's mouth and handing it to the tax collector. Masaccio then left for Rome and died there in 1428, still in his twenties.
Politics stopped the work. Brancacci was exiled by the Medici in 1436, and the walls stayed unfinished until the 1480s, when the painter Filippino Lippi completed the lower scenes. His are the angel leading Peter out of prison and the long scene of Peter before the emperor Nero, disputing with the magician Simon Magus, next to his upside-down crucifixion.
Young artists came here to copy Masaccio. According to the goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini, it was in this chapel that the sculptor Pietro Torrigiano lost his temper with the young Michelangelo and broke his nose. The frescoes came through the fire that gutted much of the church in 1771.
