PAOLO UCCELLO. — Paolo di Dono, known as P. U., was born around 1397 in Pratovecchio (Casentino) and died on 10 December 1475 in Florence. He is one of the most singular painters of the Renaissance: alongside Masaccio, he was among the first to grasp the value of perspective, rediscovered by Filippo Brunelleschi, and to benefit from the new, brilliant insights into the reduction of bodies to geometric forms. Trained in the large workshop of Ghiberti during the time of the second door of the Florence Baptistery (in whose panels, precisely, perspective was applied in the sculptural relief), he was curious about various, often contrasting experiences, which in the past led him to be mistakenly considered a “realist.” His love for perspective—which, through Vasari’s delightful *Life* dedicated to him, became proverbial—stemmed from an inner need of his imagination to express natural forms in mathematical terms.
His influence on 15th-century painting in Venice was significant and arose from his appointment to direct the music school at the Basilica of San Marco between 1425 and 1430. Later, he painted, in the Church of the Eremitani in Padua, in Palazzo Vitaliani, giant chiaroscuro figures that captivated the imagination of Andrea Mantegna. Also attributed to him, or under his immediate influence, is an early fresco in San Gottardo in Asolo (Fiocco, Boeck).
But his art, which tends toward the monumental, is best exemplified in the large fresco commissioned for Florence’s Santa Maria del Fiore, on the inner wall of the entrance, in honor of Giovanni Acuto (1436). He depicts him on horseback, imitating a bronze sculpture erected on the sarcophagus, in perspective, under the influence of the revival of the equestrian monument theme initiated by Donatello’s *Gattamelata* in Padua. In this work, the metallic color, aligned with his personal chromatic taste, derives from the desire to simulate metal, yet it assumes for him a fully original pictorial significance.
Also by his hand on the same wall are the characteristic faces of the four Prophets around the clock display, imagined in violent foreshortening from below, akin in drawing strength to the Louvre panel depicting the five masters of perspective (Giotto, Donatello, Manetti, Brunelleschi), though some critics still consider it a later copy.
Severely deteriorated but highly important for their compositional originality and chiaroscuro power are the frescoes in the Chiostro Verde of Santa Maria Novella, including *The Deluge* (carefully studied by Michelangelo), *The Drunkenness of Noah*, and *The Offering of the Patriarch* (1445–46).
Fundamental for understanding his art are the three battle paintings known as *The Rout of San Romano*, intended as a triptych—one in London, another in the Louvre, and the finest in Florence—featuring various portraits of condottieri among the combatants. The heraldic composition is transfigured into calculated and precious interlocking forms of color, inspired by the fanciful tournament armor and the large helmets of the warriors of the time. The distant landscape, with its geometric stylization, comments on the singular aspects of these knights with their long lances (c. 1456).
A similar imagination is evident in P. U.’s *Night Hunt* at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum and, with references to Northern Gothic art, in the precious panel from the Lanckoronski collection in Vienna depicting *Saint George Fighting the Dragon*, set in a landscape that foreshadows the Ferrarese painting of Cosmè Tura.
A Tuscan storyteller and keen stylist, he reveals in the predella depicting *The Stolen Host* in Urbino’s Palazzo Ducale (1469) his taste for perspective and the clarity of fanciful colors, alongside an idyllic vision of the landscape. Various portraits of elegant ladies in profile, such as the highly typical one in London, are also attributed to him, though with frequent uncertainty.
The exceptional nature of P. U.’s pictorial imagination has recently prompted deeper research into his artistic beginnings and more committed interpretations: the simplistic definition of a “bizarre” and fanciful attitude has long since given way to a higher consideration of the painter’s role at the dawn of the Renaissance, particularly in relation to the art of Piero della Francesca (Boeck, Fiocco, Salmi). The artist now appears as one of the most singular minds of that fervent period, steeped in theoretical problems and intuitions, which was 15th-century Florence, to which geometric painting today pays particular attention.
On the other hand, it is not entirely to be dismissed the hypothesis that the fanciful manner and almost naive enthusiasm with which P. U. tackled the problems of perspective, abstract color, and geometry may have their origin in an innate Gothic and heraldic vision, brilliantly re-experienced within the newest speculations of the Renaissance. — See pl. LVI.