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Masaccio's innovations are visible in the frescoes he painted about 1425 in the Chapel of the Brancacci family in Florence. In his mid-twenties he revolutionised the art of painting. In the principle scene in the series the Tribute Money Masaccio created a new sense of actual masses existing in actual space. The subject recounts how when Christ and the Apostles arrived at Capernaum, the Roman tax-gatherer came to collect tribute. Christ told Peter he would find the tribute money in the mouth of a fish in the nearby Sea of Galilee. Peter cast for the fish, found the coin, and paid the tax-gatherer. The artist has arranged the Apostle figures in a semicircle around Christ, with the discovery of the money placed in the middle distance at the left and the payoff at the right. The Apostles are enveloped in cloaks. This gives them the grandeur of sculpture and a sense of existence in space. The Apostles' faces are painted with quick, soft strokes of the brush. Masaccio has performed a miracle almost without the use of line. Form is achieved by the impact of light on an object. In this picture Masaccio proved a simple maxim that 'Nothing is seen without light'. Unlike Giotto who had attempted to take the observer only a few yards back into the picture, where he immediately encountered the flat, blue wall, Masaccio leads the eye into the distance, over the shore of Galilee, past half-dead trees to the range of far-off mountains, and eventually to the sky with its floating clouds. And while Giotto'sought for the best means of telling the story selected as the subject, Masaccio sought a fitting incident which as a theme, would enable him to depict the characters he chose to represent.

On the narrow entrance wall to the chapel Masaccio painted his vision of the Expulsion from Eden. In this fresco the clothed angel floats above, sword in one hand, the other hand points into a desolate and treeless world. Adam's powerful body is shaking with sobs; he covers his face with his hands in a paroxysm of guilt and grief. Eve covers her nakedness with her hands, but lifts up her face in a scream of pain. Masaccio's drawing of the human figures and faces is masterly. Never before the nude figures had been painted with such breadth and ease; and the man's separation from God had never before been represented with such tragic intensity.

Masaccio made a great advance in both linear and aerial perspective; his figures were placed firmly on different planes in the same composition. Masaccio's style was characterised by his contemporaries as «pure, without ornament». By the fifteenth century the Brancacci Chapel had become the place where young artists including Michelangelo, went to learn from Masaccio – the basic principles of form, space, light, and shade of the Renaissance painting.