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T HE old Egyptians believed they would come to life again in a thousand years perhaps, after they had died, but they never did. The old Greeks didn’t think much about coming to life again, but about two thousand years after the old Greek artists had died, people were born in Italy who in many ways were like those old Greeks. Indeed, these Italians were so like the old Greeks that it seemed almost as if the old Greeks had been born again, and were living once more — not in Greece,but in Italy. So we call this time the Born Again time, or by the long name Renaissance, which means Born Again.
One of the first artists of the Born Again time was a boy who had a very insulting nickname. Now, nicknames stick to some people when they grow up. But it seems strange that this boy, who became a great painter, was always called by his insulting nickname. To this very day we know him by the name Masaccio (Ma-zat’cho). That may not sound very insulting because it’s Italian, but it means “Dirty Tom.”
Masaccio was a very poor boy — perhaps that is why he was dirty — and he died young. When he died he was still very poor and still very dirty. No one seemed to like him or his painting while he lived and some people even say he was poisoned by his enemies. But after he died, people thought differently about him. Great artists thought his paintings so good that they went to the place where they could be seen, to study and copy them.
The reason other artists studied and copied his pictures is that Masaccio had found out how to do something that no artist before him had been able to do. Masaccio’s pictures did not look flat. He painted pictures so that you could see back into them. Perspective, you remember, we call it.
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For thousands of years artists had tried to get perspective,but they had not succeeded very well. So the Renaissance artists wanted to find out how Masaccio got perspective. One of his famous frescoes was a picture of the angel driving Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden.
One of these painters who studied Masaccio’s frescoes was a monk named Fra Filippo Lippi — that is,Brother Filippo, which means Philip though it is spelled with an F instead of Ph . Brother Filippo was, however, not a good and holy monk like that religious painter, Brother Angelico. Brother Filippo was a good painter, but a Bad Brother. It is said that he was bored with being good and with being a monk, so he ran away from his monastery. After many wild adventures, he was captured by pirates and made a slave. One day he drew with a piece of charcoal a picture of his master and the likeness was so good that his master set him free.
Brother Filippo made his way back to Italy and was hired to paint a picture of the Madonna for a convent. A convent is a building where women called nuns live. Nuns have given up their lives to religion and they live together as monks do in a monastery.
One of the nuns in this convent, a beautiful young girl,posed as the model for Filippo’s painting of the Virgin. Now,neither a monk nor a nun is supposed to fall in love with any one, but, in spite of what he was supposed not to do, Filippo made love to the nun and, in spite of everything, they ran away together. They had a son whom they named Filippino which means “Little Filippo.” Filippino became a great painter, too, even greater than his father.
Another artist of this time has a name — or rather two names — I like to say because each name has “ozzo” in it, a kind of rhyme. It is Benozzo Gozzoli (Ben-ot’zo Gotz’o-lē).
In the city of Pisa is a peculiar tower that does not stand straight, but leans to one side. In the same city is another peculiar thing. It is a cemetery. The peculiar thing about this cemetery is that the ground for it was brought all the way from Jerusalem so that the earth in which people were buried would be especially holy — the same ground that Christ had trod. It took fifty-three ship-loads of this holy earth to make the cemetery.It is called the Campo Santo, which means Holy Field.
Around the Campo Santo is a wall and on the inside of this wall Benozzo Gozzoli painted scenes from the Old Testament — the story of Noah, the Tower of Babel, David,Solomon, and so on — twenty-two of them. There were crowds of people in each picture and often buildings in the back of the picture (the back ground , we call it).
In most of the pictures which Benozzo Gozzoli painted,as well as in those of other painters of this time, the clothing of the people was not the kind of clothing the people of Bible times wore. And the buildings in the background were not those of Bible times or Bible places at all. The artists had not visited Bible lands and didn’t know what kind of clothes the Bible people wore or what kind of buildings they built, so they made the clothes and buildings like the Italian clothes and buildings of their own time.
So here are three painters to begin the Born Again time,the early Renaissance, the hundred years from 1400 to 1500.These three painters may not seem to you much like old Greeks born again, but be sure to remember them — Dirty Tom, the Bad Brother, and the Cemetery Painter, who lived and worked just before Columbus discovered America.