Destiny was a stranger to Tommaso. Unlike his sophisticated fellow Tuscans for whom destiny is a companion, good or evil, always at your side, Tommaso kept him at a distance and called him Satan. Destiny Satan would have to wait his time.  
      Traffic on Via Cassia between Florence and Rome was heavy for November. After weeks of rain the skies were usually dark, the road a sea of slime and mire. The wind blew cold across the valleys from east and west.  
      Ox carts lumbered along on the right, carriages with their curtains drawn rushed past on the left and from time to time groups of two and three riders on horseback trotted arrogantly in the middle of the deeply rutted road. Swearing pedestrians held to the high grass along the sides, pulling cloaks and shawls around their faces against swirling dirt and splashing mud.  
      Tommaso had picked up the heavily traveled north-south axis to the west of San Giovanni Valdarno where he’d visited his parents. After years of bohemian existence in Florence, he’d wallowed in the comforts of home. Home-cooked meals, baths, and fresh clothes seemed like reward. Sometimes he was torn between the comforts of a residential life and a life for his art.  
      He’d left his meager worldly possessions with his father, keeping for himself enough money to live until he started earning in Rome. He didn’t know how long he would be away. He hadn’t the remotest idea where he would be living.  
      His eyes before him on the mud-filled ruts and sharp stones he was tramping down the road winding downhill from the last Tuscan mountain hurdle when the two men began walking alongside him. Absent-mindedly he scrutinized them out of the corner of his eyes, as usual more interested in the faces than in whom they were. He hoped that he didn’t look well to do and checked the money belt under his clothes as his parents had recommended.  
      “We’re from Arezzo,” the younger one said. “I’m Piero and he’s my friend.” Grinning broadly, he pointed at the older man who merely grunted. “Mind if we walk together? It’s a long way, to Rome. Is that where you’re going?”  
      “Better in company … here on the main road,” Tommaso said with a smirk, “rather than risk the bandits on the back roads. There’s practically nobody on the road around Siena these days without an armed escort.”  
      “Yeah, bandits galore on the back roads in these parts. Armies of them. It’s a way of life. What’s Tuscany without its rebels and bandits? And its saints and heretics. But you sound like an experienced traveler … doesn’t he, Nonno?” He nudged the gray-bearded man beside him that he called “grandpa” and slapped his leg. “Or are you a pilgrim?”  
      Tommaso laughed at this garrulous character’s antics. Entertainment made the time pass. God knows how long it would take with the rain and bad roads. “Hardly. No, just looking for work.”  
      “So are we,” said the other. “Everything is changing in these times.”  
      Tommaso was tired of Florence. He wanted change. At 27 he still wanted adventure. He had to learn about life in the world. Anyway, violence and treachery were rampant in Florence, even if it was far from his life. The Guelfs and the Ghibelline were in permanent conspiracy in the city that Dante and Bocaccio had made into the spiritual capital. Conspirators were plotting the return of the exile, Cosimo de’ Medici. Power politics was the practice. And wealth was pouring into the city. Florentine banks were the Pope’s bankers. Tuscan wines and silks were flooding Europe. Rich Florentines didn’t worry about the Turkish armies at the gate of Europe but looked with envy at the Portuguese navigators discovering new markets around the world.  
      In the year of 1428 the market reigned supreme. The poor were poorer, the rich richer.  
      Outside the cities it was worse. People were afraid. Everyone was armed—to defend their homes and families, they said. The plebes hated the patricians, the patricians hated each other. Hatred permeated the world.  
      It seemed that only the soaring Romanesque cathedrals rising along the banks of the Arno River offered security against the forces of the Devil. Now all the artists, young and old, wanted to decorate those churches and spread the message of the new age about to dawn in Europe. Tommaso Guidi knew he was in the forefront.  
      “Oh yes, the patrons like my message, my new art,” he muttered to himself as he did when he was alone on the scaffold. It seemed much of his life had been spent on scaffolds in dark cold churches, talking to himself, pumping his arms and doing knee bends trying to keep warm.  
      He recalled also that some of his colleagues and all his rivals liked him less than the patrons. Jealousy and envy, he knew. They’re not all forward looking like my friends Brunelleschi and Angelico and Donatello and Filippo Lippi.  
      Tommaso stopped to pull up his heavy, dark blue stockings now caked in mud and colorless. He tucked the tops far up under the wool knee britches. He opened his rough cloak wider at the neck for he was sweating under a sudden noonday sun. He looked to the east and saw the church spires of what he thought was the old hill town of Montepulciano. Olive trees specked the sides of the hills, cypresses lined the crest. He tilted his head backward and saluted the Tuscan sky. Its light was the source of his inspiration. The world is a good place, he thought.  
      “What did you …?” Piero started to ask, when an open carriage passed them on the left at a rapid clip.  
      A young dandy with long blond hair was leaning out, beating on the side, and calling toward them. “Masaccio! Why it’s Masaccio! Look, look!” he shouted at his fashionably dressed companions in the carriage. “Isn’t that Masaccio over there?” “Where, where?” shouted the others. “Where’s Masaccio.”  
      Tommaso looked around him ostentatiously, as if they were speaking to someone else. Pushed by other vehicles from behind, the carriage moved on.  
      Piero looked at him. “Masaccio? Is that you? The famous artist? Ai, Nonno! We’re in the company of a famous man. Rich too.”  
      It was true that he was now famous. Of course he’d wanted glory. But he didn’t know his art was great until his new friends told him so. He didn’t know he was changing the direction of art. How could he’ve known? The uneducated boy from the countryside. For him his art was the result of long solitary hours on a scaffold searching for a color, a line, a certain light. Was that greatness?  
      Now not even the artists in Florence remembered that he was Tommaso from San Giovanni Valdarno. After all, he had spent ten of his 27 years in the capital. He hadn’t even had time for school. Masaccio, they called him. He liked that name. He felt it suited him. “Maso,” as friends called him at first. Then those final letters of Tommaso plus the derogatory suffix, “accio,” because of the sloppy way he dressed and his careless manner.  
      But the real artists didn’t care how he dressed. For he was the revolutionary and they had to follow his lead.  
      “They confused me with someone else,” he said. Tommaso looked like any of the rough workers in the San Frediano district of Florence where he lived and worked. Of medium height, he had a strong face, thick hair, dark glowing eyes, good shoulders and strong legs. He could take care of himself.  
      Piero grinned malevolently, nudged him in the ribs, and said, “don’t worry, we’ll travel in close company. Eh, Nonno. We’ll take care of Masaccio, no? In Rome you’ll need protection. Very dangerous there among all those robbers and priests.”  
      Tommaso grinned at Piero and nodded. Like most Tuscans, Piero and Nonno despised the clergy. Priests were the butts of all their jokes. Priests were the eternal womanizers and sodomizers for the godless Tuscans, who everyone said, went to hell just to take a piss. The only Christians unafraid of hell. Hell is just over the hill, a fine place, much like Tuscany. Where people are bizarre, rebellious and irreverent. Not by chance did Dante locate his inferno in Tuscany. And as far as heaven was concerned, who wanted to live in heaven when you could live in Tuscany?  
      In a flash Tommaso understood why it had fallen to that band of Tuscans to start up the “new art” - Brunelleschi, Donatello, Michelozzi, Beato Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Masolino. Because they’re opening their eyes to see man as he really is, good and evil, sinner and saint, heretic and believer. Real men of the real world. In the very real world of Tuscany, hell and heaven, inferno and paradise. Only Tuscans could do it.

As if the trip wasn’t long and difficult enough! Days and days and nights and nights of mud and mire, sleeping a few hours when they found space in the rare shelters or at a table in an hostaria—and now, he thought, the risk of being robbed by travel companions.  
      He had wanted the experience of the pilgrims’ trail to Rome. The faces along the way. The spiritual experience, some said. But was Rome worth it? he wondered again. Maybe it was a bad idea. But Masolino, his master, had already gone to Rome and was urging his star pupil to join him. New commissions awaited them. He would now make his name in the Papal state.  
      “Master?” he said aloud. Again Piero looked at him and waited.  
      Tommaso turned away with a frown. He had to break that habit of talking aloud. The world is not a scaffold. Masolino can’t teach me anything else—well, maybe some technique—but certainly nothing about colors and content. Just because they worked so closely and shared the same name: Tommaso.  
      Moreover, he regretted leaving Brunelleschi, and Donatello too. Things were booming for them all. He and Brunellschi had just finished the chapel in Santa Maria Novella. His soaring ceilings and my Trinita! All of Florence is still to be re-done, recreated, illuminated, modernized. Enough of those insipid heavenly faces and mythical heroes. Man, he reminded himself, is at the center of our art. Let’s bring light into man’s dark and bitter life. Light and darkness, that’s my key. And also the colors. The rich colors of Florence and the hills and valleys. Color like light permeates those shadows. My job is to take the light of the sun and illuminate them. Real men in the real world in shadows and light and bathed in color. Real heroes of everyday life.  
      “That’s my secret,” he said.  
      “What’s that?” Piero said. “What’s your secret? Nonno, did you hear? Masaccio here has secrets to reveal to us.”  
      “Not much of a secret!” Tommaso added. But his art had made the name “Masaccio” famous. The revolutionary of Florentine art.  
      It seemed that things had always moved fast in his life. His entire life was revolution. He’d already seen the future in his few paintings done as a boy at home. He was still an adolescent when he got to Florence to enter the art school where he was inscribed as a pupil under the name of “Masus S. Johannis Simonis pictor populi Santi Nicolai de Florentia.” He was still a boy when he did a polyptich in the Church of San Giovanni in Cascia-Reggello near Florence. Still only a boy when he frescoed the cloister in the Carmine Church—enough to get him the job of doing then the chapel with Masolino.  
      “Still, the Brancacci Chapel is mine!” he said. “Mine! There they can see my real people straight out of Florentine life.” It was those faces he frescoed in the chapel and Brunelleschi’s friendship that opened the doors of Florence to him.  
      That’s how I got the commission for my Crucifixion. Now there’s a real Christ! he thought. A real man. His chest swollen. His head down between his shoulders in pain and resignation. They all say this is the highest expression of our art. A landmark in the history of man’s image of himself. It’s my monument! He could hardly believe his ears or understand the praise. He felt drunk with love for his new art.  
      Yes, it was time to move to Rome—while I’m on top. Tommaso Masaccio eyed warily his companions. He saw that they were alone in the world. Trouble and Satan come to the lonely, he thought. But not to me. My solitude is my genius. Solitude and the light of the sun.  
      Friends and parents had warned him of the dangers. Tommaso was absent minded. He usually just bulled his way ahead, unaware of life’s perils. He didn’t care. Not about dress, nor about other people, not about himself. Only his art mattered. And those few friends. Friends, a fiasco of wine when they met, and his art. Their art. But was that life?  
      From time to time he looked left and right along desolate parts of Via Cassia. They were in an endless valley between high hills on either side. All day they had been watching the image of the town of Orvieto growing bigger on the high hill to the east. He listened to the wind blowing up the valley as it often did through his churches.  
      “Out there on the highway your life is always in danger,” Brunelleschi had warned. “Threat and menace are everywhere,” Donatello said.  
      Tommaso shrugged. He was glad to have travel companions.

Waves of torches and oil lamps and fires cast an eerie yellow glow on the skies over Rome now locked behind its great wall. In their haste to arrive, Tommaso, a few wagoneers and those two dark figures of Piero and Nonno had continued on to the Urbe after darkness had fallen over the hills north of the city. They waited while a Seineur in an elegant carriage bribed the guards to open the gate.  
      Once inside the wall, Tommaso stopped, bewildered by the fires and torches, the horses and cattle. “What a stink!” he exclaimed. How different from elegant Florence. After the countryside, the stench of the narrow streets was nauseating.  
      He edged slowly forward. It was time to shake his companions. Without so much as a goodbye, he launched himself into the labyrinth of alleys and passageways packed with scurrying figures and heavy horses and carts of shouting hawkers. Asking frequently directions to San Clemente where Masolino awaited him and all the while looking over his shoulders for signs of his now unwanted companions, he followed beckoning torches and occasional carriages hurrying through the wider streets. Escape was on his mind.  
      “Just after the arena,” a pedestrian informed him about the famous church where Masolino was working. “Then up the steep hill.” As he descended the Quirinal Hill he could see down below in the flickering torchlight flashes of the ruins of the abandoned Roman Forum, now in the hands of bandits. And there behind it, he knew, was the hulk of the Coliseum. He turned a corner and suddenly there it was, the great arena of the gladiators. He knew he was close.  
      But wait. There on a corner was the inn where Masolino and he had stayed on his only previous trip to Rome. He remembered the ground floor establishment with a torch in front and a branch hanging over its door. It looked inviting. A great hunger and fatigue overcame him. Relax before San Clemente. Masolino can wait.  
      The heat and the smoke inside were shocking, the smells a mixture of the stench of filth and cooking food. Flames flickered and shadows danced along thick stonewalls. It was a Roman hell. Figures darted in an out. There were whispered exchanges among the clients as they examined new arrivals. I certainly don’t look as if I had a moneybag around my waist! That was his concern. Not to become a target.  
      Stay out of the limelight, Brunelleschi repeated. Be modest and reserved. No man is safe on the streets of this city of bandits and priests. But this was not Tommaso’s nature. Fuck it all, he thought. Better to have a little fun if I have to be running around like this.  
      He was fortunate to find a place in the rear near the wine kegs. He ordered the Roman white wine. “The priests’ wine,” Masolino always said. “So it must be good.” So light and good after Tuscan reds. He ate Roman style lamb and roasted chicken and strong bread. Ah, that’s better now. This wine goes down so easily. Like water.  
      How charming, he thought, but also how irritating to us Tuscans, the lackadaisical loud Roman dialect spoken at the nearby tables. They drank less but talked more than taciturn Tuscans. They all talk at once. How do they ever understand one another?  
      Out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw momentarily his erstwhile companions. They’re up to no good, he knew. Yes, there they were, near the front, talking with two half naked waiters. They must have followed me after all.  
      “Hey!” he called to a waiter, “Take those fellows over there a glass of wine from me,” he said, trying not to slur any words. “They’re friends,” he added. The waiter did as he was told and was soon back confabulating with Piero and Nonno.  
      Dio! This Roman wine is stronger than it seems. It’s gone to my head. He watched the two Florentines watching him. His head was swimming. His stomach rumbled. He ate more chicken. He felt strange. Maybe that soup was spoiled.  
      “I need air. Air, quick, or I’ll pass out. Wait, I have to pay.” How to get to his money belt? He fumbled under his clothes. The two bandits were watching and grinning. “Let me, here,” he mumbled toward the waiter.… “Just a moment, I’ll be right back. I need air.”  
      He stumbled out into the darkness. Must get to San Clemente. Masolino is waiting. My Rome paintings are there. Everyone knows my tryptich in Santa Maria Maggiore. He hung onto that knowledge to stay sober and upright. It was his. He teetered and zigzagged ahead. He was drunk and sick. He hoped he was headed up the hill that would take him to the security of San Clemente.  
      Soon he heard the shadows closing in behind him. Suddenly strong arms encircled him from behind. He was strong too and struggled. He felt a sudden searing pain in his side. “Masolino sends this to you, upstart!” he heard before darkness descended into his brain.  
      Hours, days or weeks later he awakened, dried blood in his opened clothes, rags binding his hands and feet. The room was bathed in chiaroscuro. The shadowy figures of Piero and Nonno were looking down at him. Sanguinely he stared up at them and felt … he felt the absence of his money belt.  
      No matter, he suddenly thought as his senses returned. He didn’t feel so bad, except for that wound in his right side. But when he peered into the silence and listened to the shadows, he knew.  
      “Am I a hostage?” he asked. “I suppose someone will pay my ransom.”  
      “We’ve been paid,” Piero said.  
      “Paid?” Tommaso asked. “Paid? Who paid?”  
      “Friends … and enemies, maybe both. You never know when you’re dealing with Tuscans. You should know that. It’s more rewarding to betray a friend.”  
      A frisson of mystery ran down his body. Mysterious like the freshly smeared paint you find in the early morning on a canvas you worked on last evening. And you recall the noctural nightmare of its destruction. Why that dream? Or was it reality too?  
      He looked at the two lonely figures and knew that Satan was near.  

    

 EPILOGUE

Masaccio was not an artist who gained recognition only after his death. His fellow artists of the Cinquecento were in awe of the innovator and modernist. Admired by his contemporaries and generations of Florentine painters and labeled by their art historian Vasari as “the fundamental painter of the Renaissance,” Tommaso Guidi, the rough boy from the countryside, changed the direction of art.  
     Masaccio’s greatest moment, the frescoes in Brancacci Chapel [1424-27] in the little Church of Carmine on the Left Bank of Florence, was restored several years ago and stands today as it did nearly seven hundred years ago. In those few square meters of frescoes, one sees the victory of the new over the old.  
      The greatest threat to Masaccio’s chapel occurred in 1690 when a rich merchant attempted to buy it and destroy the frescoes so hated by the monks who controlled the Carmine Church. Only the fame the frescoes acquired in the 15th century saved them. That prestige did not block the reconstruction of the church in 1746 that destroyed some of his works there. A fire in 1771 damaged the frescoes, this time saved by providential restoration sponsored by the Grandduke of Tuscany. Nor did fires, dirt and candle fumes extinguish completely the genius of Masaccio who remains for art historians the high point of the Rinascimento.  
      It is known that Masaccio left for Rome in 1428 or 1429, and disappeared. Poisoned by rivals? Killed by bandits along the way or in the dark alleys of Rome? No one knows. He was swallowed up by that dynamic world in change from one ruled by superstitions to one of realism and even humanism. A genius and a rebel, he was feared and hated by an old Church, by intriguing politicians and artist competitors.  
      As one says, there’s nothing new under the sun.