Santa Maria del Carmine and the Brancacci Chapel
Why is it significant?
In front of you rises another facade of bare, rough stone, with holes still left by the medieval scaffolding... another Oltrarno church that never got its marble coat. Do not be fooled. Inside, in a small chapel on the right side, is one of the turning points in the history of Western painting.
Key Facts
| Place | Santa Maria del Carmine and the Brancacci Chapel |
|---|---|
| Address | Piazza del Carmine 14, 50124 Firenze FI, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 43.76800, 11.24390 |
| Part of Walk | Florence Across the Arno: Oltrarno Artisans, Santo Spirito & San Frediano |
| Generated | Generated |
In front of you rises another facade of bare, rough stone, with holes still left by the medieval scaffolding... another Oltrarno church that never got its marble coat. Do not be fooled. Inside, in a small chapel on the right side, is one of the turning points in the history of Western painting.
In the 1420s the silk merchant Felice Brancacci hired two painters to decorate his family chapel with the life of Saint Peter. The older one, Masolino, was elegant and graceful. The younger one was barely in his twenties and was called Masaccio, roughly Clumsy Tom, because he cared so little about his clothes, his money or his manners. He cared only about painting.
What Masaccio painted here was new. His Adam and Eve, driven out of Paradise, are not elegant figures; Eve throws her head back and howls, Adam hides his face in his hands. His apostles stand with real weight on real ground, lit by a light that seems to come from the actual window of the chapel. Painters came here to learn for a century, and Vasari says that the young Michelangelo spent hours copying these walls.
And it was here, the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini later wrote, that Michelangelo mocked a fellow student, Pietro Torrigiano, once too often. Torrigiano punched him in the face so hard that he broke his nose. Every portrait of Michelangelo you will ever see shows that flattened nose.
Masaccio left for Rome and died there in 1428, aged about twenty-six. The chapel was finished decades later by Filippino Lippi. In 1771 a fire gutted almost the whole church, yet the Brancacci Chapel survived. A long restoration in the 1980s cleaned away centuries of soot and removed the fig leaves that a prudish age had painted over Adam and Eve. Walk to the north side of the square, where it meets Borgo San Frediano, and turn left along it.