PAOLO UCCELLO. - Paolo di Dono, called P. U., b. ca. 1397 at Pratovecchio (Casentino), d. 10 December 1475 at Florence. He is one of the most singular painters of the Renaissance: alongside Masaccio, he was among the first to grasp the value of the perspective rediscovered by Filippo Brunellesco and to profit from the new, brilliant intuitions in the field of reducing bodies to geometric form. Trained in Ghiberti's large workshop, at the time of the second door of the Florence baptistery (in whose compartments, precisely, perspective is realized in sculptural relief), he was curious about varied and often contrasting experiences, which caused him in the past to be considered, wrongly, a "verist." His stubborn love of perspective, which, through the delightful "life" devoted to him by Giorgio Vasari, became proverbial, sprang from an intimate need of his imagination, bent on formulating even natural forms in mathematical terms. His influence on fifteenth-century painting in Venice is highly symptomatic and was brought about by the commission offered him to direct the mosaic school of the basilica of St. Mark between 1425 and 1430. Later he painted, at the Church of the Eremitani in Padua, in the Palazzo Vitaliani, gigantic figures in chiaroscuro, which struck the imagination of Andrea Mantegna. An early fresco in S. Gottardo at Asolo would also be his, or under his immediate influence (Fiocco, Boeck).
But his art, which tends toward the monumental, is defined in the great fresco commissioned from him in Florence for S. Maria del Fiore on the inner wall of the entrance, in honor of Giovanni Acuto (1436), whom he portrays on horseback in imitation of a bronze sculpture erected on the sarcophagus, in perspective, under the influence of the revival of the theme of the equestrian monument begun with Donatello's Gattamelata in Padua. In it the metallic color, attuned to a personal chromatic taste, derives from the intention of feigning metal, but for him it takes on the meaning of full pictorial originality.
Also his, on the same wall, are the characteristic faces of the four Prophets around the clock face, imagined in violent foreshortening from below, akin, in drawing power, to the Louvre panel with the five masters of perspective (Giotto, Donatello, Manetti, Brunellesco), which some critics nevertheless believe to be a late copy.
Much deteriorated, but very important for compositional originality and chiaroscuro power, are the frescoes of the Green Cloister of S. Maria Novella with the Deluge (certainly attentively considered by Michelangelo), the Drunkenness of Noah, and the Sacrifice of the Patriarch (1445-46).
Fundamental for understanding his art are the three battle paintings, known as the "Rout of S. Romano," intended to form a triptych, one in London, another in the Louvre, the finest in Florence, with various portraits of condottieri inserted among the combatants. The composition, heraldic in taste, is transfigured into calculated and precious interlockings of color and form, drawing inspiration from the fabulous tournament armors and the great helmets of the warriors of the time. The distant landscape comments, with its geometric stylization, on the singular aspects of these knights with their long lances (ca. 1456).
P. U. developed a similar imagination in the Night Hunt of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and, with echoes of northern Gothic, in the precious small panel of the Lanckoronski collection in Vienna with St. George fighting the dragon, in a landscape that foreshadows the Ferrarese painting of Cosmè Tura.
A spirit narratively Tuscan and a keen stylist, he manifests in the predella with the depiction of the Stolen Host, in the Ducal Palace of Urbino (1469), his taste for perspective and the clarity of fanciful colors, alongside an idyllic landscape vision. Finally, various portraits of elegant ladies, in profile, are attributed to him, with frequent uncertainty, such as the highly typical one in London.
The exceptional nature of P. U.'s pictorial imagination has in modern times aroused more thorough research into his beginnings in art and more demanding interpretations: the simplistic definition of an attitude, albeit "bizarre" and fanciful, has long since been replaced by a higher consideration of the painter's figure at the beginnings of the Renaissance, especially 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, saturated with theoretical problems and intuitions, which was the Florentine Quattrocento, to which geometrizing painting today looks with particular attention.
On the other hand, the hypothesis is not entirely to be discarded that the fabulous manner and the almost naive enthusiasm with which P. U. confronts the problems of perspective, of abstract color and of geometry, have their first cause in an innate Gothic and heraldic vision, brilliantly relived in the newest speculations of the Renaissance. - See pl. LVI.
Bibliography4 works
Valerio Mariani