Madonna Casini

The Madonna Casini, painted around 1426 and now in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, takes its name from a later owner and represents Masaccio"s intimate, devotional mode as distinct from his public altarpiece commissions. The small panel shows the Virgin and Child in a format intended for private prayer, yet Masaccio brings the same revolutionary naturalism to this intimate work as to his monumental frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel. The Christ Child"s naturalistic gesture of eating grapes—a eucharistic symbol—is rendered with an unprecedented sense of observed infant behavior.

Despite the small scale, Masaccio achieves remarkable monumentality through the solid modeling of the Madonna"s face and the Child"s body. The gold ground retains the iconic quality of devotional painting while the figures project forward with a three-dimensional presence that was revolutionary in the 1420s. The flesh painting shows careful observation of how light models form, with warm highlights and cool shadows creating convincing volume. The Madonna"s blue mantle is modeled with the broad tonal gradations that Masaccio substituted for the linear drapery patterns of earlier painting.