To the list of unforgettable art experiences available in Florence we can now add one more: the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but only over the next year, for an intimate encounter with the greatest painting in the history of Western art, Masaccio’s Expulsion. This image of Adam and Eve being driven from the Garden of Eden belongs to a celebrated fresco cycle in the Brancacci Chapel in the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine. The paintings are currently in the early stages of a conservation campaign underwritten by the Friends of Florence and the Jay Pritzker Foundation.
Commissioned by the eponymous Felice Brancacci in 1423, the cycle depicts, in the main, scenes from the life of Saint Peter. Masaccio worked on it with another painter, Masolino, completing about half of the frescoes himself. The project was interrupted in 1427, when both left Florence. Masaccio died the following year, at age 26, of unknown causes. Giorgio Vasari, in his famous Lives of the Artists, observed that, had the young painter lived, “he would have produced even greater fruits in his art.” The cycle would be completed 30 years later by Filippino Lippi.
