Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/101

1447] The similarity of names between these two men the elder, Tommaso, who was known as Masolino, "Little Tom," and the younger, who acquired the nickname of Masaccio, "Big Tom," or, as Browning renders it, "hulking Tom," has been productive of endless confusion. At one time the very personality of Masolino was in danger of being merged in that of his more distinguished scholar. But recent research has done much to clear away these difficulties, and to distinguish between the work of the two artists, if the chronology of their lives still remains wrapt in obscurity, and if critics cannot yet agree as to the exact share which each master had in the famous frescoes of the Brancacci Chapel. Masolino, or, to call him by his full name, Tommaso di Cristoforo di Fino, was the son of a house-painter of Panicale, a hamlet in the commune of Colle di Val d'Elsa, where he was born in 1383. Vasari's statements that he learnt painting of Starnina, and worked as a goldsmith in Ghiberti's shop, are both probably correct. It is true that Masolino was only five years younger than Ghiberti, but since he did not matriculate as a painter until January 1423, he may have been employed before this as that master's assistant. Throughout his career, his amiable character and impressionable nature led him to make friends easily, and to assimilate new ideas wherever he met with them. Of his early works we have no record, and the first painting we have from his hand is a Madonna, at Bremen, which bears the date of 1423, together with the inscription: O quanta misericordia di Dio!—"O how great is the mercy of God!" Here the drapery recalls Lorenzo Monaco's style, while the