San Andrés

Masaccio painted this in 1426, and he had only two years left to live. He was 25, working in Pisa on a big multi-panel altarpiece for a notary who paid 80 florins for the whole thing. Saint Andrew stood off to one side of it, holding the slanted cross of his martyrdom. What made Masaccio the talk of the next generation is right here in one small figure: the way real light seems to fall across the folds of the robe and around the weight of the cross, so the saint stands in actual space rather than on a flat gold ground. The altarpiece was taken apart and scattered in the 18th century, its panels now in different countries. Scholars pieced its original layout back together from a description Giorgio Vasari wrote in 1568.