La decapitazione di san Giovanni Battista

Masaccio painted this small panel in 1426 for the base of a large altarpiece in the Carmelite church at Pisa. He was about 25 and had roughly two years to live. He died around 1428, still in his twenties. The altarpiece was dismantled long ago and its parts scattered across Europe, so this fragment, showing the sword at the moment John the Baptist is beheaded, ended up in Berlin. It was bought for the museum there in 1880 by Wilhelm von Bode, the curator who assembled much of that collection. The bodies here already stand with a real weight and cast believable shadow, the naturalism that younger Florentine painters would travel to study and carry into the next century.