On the first Easter morning, Christ’s followers were mourning, and his despairing Apostles hid in a locked room. The broken and bloodied corpse of Jesus had been laid in a tomb, and a heavy stone blocked its entrance. But faithful women had already awoken and had left for the tomb to finish anointing the body

In 1424, the 23-year-old Florentine artist Masaccio was commissioned to paint frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel. As one enters this chapel, the first panel on the upper left is his work The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden. The scene has an austerity that might induce a perfunctory glance, but the sculpture-like realism of the