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Masaccio had barely six years as a working painter, yet he changed the direction of Florentine art before he turned twenty-seven. Born Tommaso di Ser Giovanni in 1401 near Florence, he gave his figures a solid, three-dimensional weight and used light and shadow to build believable space in a way Florentine painting had not shown before him.

His major work is the fresco cycle in the Brancacci Chapel of Santa Maria del Carmine, begun around 1424 alongside the older painter Masolino and left unfinished when Masaccio was called to Rome. Scenes like The Tribute Money and The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden use a single consistent light source and correct linear perspective to make saints and sinners look like they occupy the same physical room as the viewer, a sharp departure from the flatter, more decorative Gothic style still common at the time.

Masaccio died in Rome in the autumn of 1428, not yet twenty-seven, the exact cause unrecorded though plague is the likeliest explanation. For decades afterward, young painters including Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo went to the Brancacci Chapel specifically to study and copy his frescoes, treating them as a working textbook for how to paint the human body.