pay, and claimed in 1427, for salary in arrear, six florins. The family lived in a house of the quarter S. Croce, for which they paid ten florins a year, and Tommaso kept one of the shops annexed to the old Badia, built, it is said, by Arnolfo near the Palazzo del Podesta, for which he paid two florins a year. 1 The condition of Masaccio was more favorable according to his own account than the reality. Niccolo di Ser Lapo, in his schedule of the year 1427 declares, that Thommaso di Ser Giovanni owes him 200 livres, and, in a later declaration of 1430, that sixty eight livres were still due which he had no hope of ever receiving, as Thommaso had gone to Rome, had died there, and his brother Giovanni pretended that he was not the heir. 2 Yet Masaccio did not allow the unfavorable condition of his daily existence to affect his mind or spirits; and were we not assured by Vasari, “that he loved solitude and the confinement of his room, and cared as little for himself as for the world in general,” 3 the peculiar cha racter of his artistic creations would have suggested that he lived for his art solely, and that a fire burnt within him, incompatible with aught but the pursuit of those great problems of perfection in art which he had appa rently determined to search to their innermost depth, and which, in truth, were through him as nearly solved as was possible for a genius of the fifteenth century. Ac cording to the admission of the Aretine biographer, the frescos of the Brancacci chapel were not all executed at one time, and Masaccio interrupted his labours on one occasion at least when he consented to perpetuate the memory of the consecration of the Carmine by a fresco representing that event. It will be remembered that that ceremony took place on the nineteenth of April 1422. The probability is therefore that the date of the 1 See the original “Denunzie” in Gaye, Carteggio. Vol. I. p. 116. 2 See the “Denunzie” of Nic colo di Ser Lapo, for 1427 and 1430 in Gior. Stor. d. Arehiv. Tosc. 3 d quarter 1860. 3 Vas. Vol. III. p. 154.