Art by Masaccio

Masaccio died at just 26 or 27, reportedly in Rome, possibly of illness though rumors of poisoning persisted for years, and still managed to fundamentally reset the direction of Western painting in the few years he was working. His frescoes in Florence's Brancacci Chapel and his Holy Trinity, one of the first paintings to use fully consistent, mathematically constructed linear perspective, gave figures a weight, gravity, and physical presence that Italian painting hadn't really had before. Vasari later credited him directly as the true founder of the modern manner of painting, a claim later art history has mostly agreed with despite how short his actual career was.