Moments from Brancacci Chapel

Tucked inside the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence, this small chapel holds a fresco cycle begun around 1424 by Masaccio, working alongside the older painter Masolino, that changed what Italian painting was capable of almost overnight. Masaccio was in his early twenties and dead by twenty-six, but in the few years he had he painted figures with real weight, real perspective, and real shame, his Expulsion from Eden shows Adam and Eve genuinely wailing, faces contorted, rather than posed decorously as earlier painters would have shown them. Vasari records that Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael all came to study and sketch directly from these walls, treating the chapel as something close to a training ground for the entire Renaissance.

The frescoes were finished decades later by Filippino Lippi after Masaccio's death, and part of the pleasure of the chapel is spotting the handoff, comparing Masaccio's blunt emotional force against Lippi's more decorative later additions. Visits are timed and limited to protect the frescoes, so book ahead rather than showing up expecting to walk straight in. Stand back far enough to take in the whole cycle before zooming into individual scenes, the chapel is small enough that it's easy to get too close too fast and miss how the story reads as a sequence.