Word: masaccios
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Seurat, like Masaccio or Mozart, was a true prodigy. Born in 1859, he succumbed to an attack of galloping diphtheria in 1891, at 31. This all too early death has had the effect of concentrating his life around a single stylistic effort, the invention of pointillism. The one thing everyone knows about Seurat is that he painted rather stiff pictures composed of dots, in the belief that this system of breaking down color into its constituent parts was scientific and not, like Monet's Impressionism, intuitive...
...Even today, Sano di Pietro and the Master of the Osservanza are not exactly names to conjure with. Florence, Siena's political and cultural rival, emerged from their wars victorious in more ways than one. Firenze has always dominated the Western imagination. You cannot imagine the city of Giotto, Masaccio, Donatello, Brunelleschi, Leonardo and Michelangelo any differently: Florence was the locus classicus of Renaissance thought...
...fierce empiricism of Masaccio, determined to fill real space with real figures that the senses could know, made its mark on some painters but not others. Perspective in 15th century Siena was something an artist could use as a scaffolding, modify or abandon altogether; Sassetta (Stefano di Giovanni, active from 1423 to 1450) did this all the time. He studied earlier Sienese artists, mainly Pietro Lorenzetti, for spatial clues as carefully as Masaccio looked at Giotto, and inevitably, came up with a lighter, slightly flatter and, as it were, more spindly and papery space -- which he still imbued with...
...from the late '20s on. Cezanne's ponderous and sculptural Bathers spoke to his own obsessions with the reclining figure. Archaic sculpture of every kind, especially Mayan and Aegean, fortified his lifelong interest in totems and sentinel figures; and then there were Donatello and Michelangelo, the painted figures of Masaccio and, perhaps most challenging to him in his maturity, the sculptures of Giovanni Pisano in Siena and Pisa, not far from the marble quarries at Forte dei Marmi, where he took to working during the summers...
...because of Hitler. In 1937 he painted a big-jawed self portrait, titled Portrait of a "Degenerate Artist," which commemorated his inclusion in the Nazi exhibition of "Degenerate Art." A figure among the trees, in the background on the left, sketchily furnishes the key: it is the Adam from Masaccio's Expulsion from Paradise. Kokoschka was being driven from his European paradise. He went to England and remained throughout the war. There he painted a number of harsh, hard-to-read political allegories, inspired by the cartoons of Gillray and other Georgian caricaturists, and supported himself by teaching and portraiture...