Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/120

94 at Vienna, while the Berlin Museum has acquired the predella of the Adoration of the Magi and Martyrdom of St. Peter and St. John the Baptist, a set of little pictures of great interest as examples of the painter's more fanciful and imaginative treatment. In the same lighter and more humorous vein is another small panel at Berlin, one of the painted birth-plates, or desco da parto, which it was the fashion to send with fruits and cakes and other presents to Florentine mothers on the birth of a child. The happy mother is seen lying in bed, attended by a sour-looking old nurse, while two servants are seen arriving in the courtyard with a birth-plate and gifts in their hands, and two young heralds, blowing trumpets and bearing the lilies of Florence on their banner, announce the arrival of some visitor of importance. It is a delightful little bit of genre painting, in which Masaccio displays his skill in chiaroscuro and perspective, in one of those cleverly sketched interiors of which Vasari speaks, and at the same time excites our admiration by the "vivacity" of his heads and "beautiful alacrity of gesture and expression." And it acquires additional interest from the fact that a desco da parto is mentioned in Lorenzo de' Medici's inventory as being the work of Masaccio.

But we must turn to the six frescoes, which Masaccio executed during the last years of his life, in the Brancacci Chapel, and which are universally recognised to be his work. On the left pilaster at the entrance he painted the Expulsion from Paradise as a companion picture to the Fall of Adam and Eve, on the opposite wall. The extra-