The
Battle of San Romano
Paolo
UCCELLO
After
1432
Paolo
Uccello (born Paolo di Dono, 1397 – December 10, 1475) was a Florentine
painter who was notable of visual perspective in art. Giorgio Vasari in
his book Lives of the Artist wrote that Uccello was obsessed by his interest
in perspective and would stay up all night in his study trying to grasp
the exact vanishing point. He used perspective in order to create a feeling
of depth in his paintings and not, as his contemporaries, to narrate different
or succeeding stories.
His
best known works are the three paintings representing the battle of San
Romano (for a long time these were wrongly entitled the "Battle of Sant'
Egidio of 1416").
Paolo
worked in the Late Gothic tradition, and emphasized colour and pageantry
rather than the Classical realism that other artists were pioneering. His
style is best described as idiosyncratic, and he left no school of followers.
He had some influence on twentieth century art and literary criticism.
Birth
name Paolo di Dono
Born
1397
Florence
Died
10 December 1475
Florence
Nationality
Florentine
Field
painting
Training
Lorenzo Ghiberti
Movement
International Gothic
Full
title ‘Niccolò Mauruzi
da
Tolentino at the Battle
of
San Romano’
Wood,
originally arched top,
181.6
x 320 cm. No. 583,
Purchased,
1857.
This
brilliantly coloured and structured painting depicts part of the battle
of San Romano,
fought
between Florence and Siena in 1432. The central figure is Niccolò
da Tolentino,
the
leader of the victorious Florentine forces.
The
panel is one of a set of three. The other two are in Florence and Paris.
They
were painted for the Medici family, sometime between 1435 and 1460.
The
pictures reflect both courtly decoration, such as tapestry, and
Renaissance
scientific picture- making, notably in the use
of
single vanishing-point perspective.
The
Battle of San Romano
Perspective
Uccello
studied perspective of both space and individual objects.
Objects
like the knight’s body at the front of the picture are foreshortened.
At
two metres high one would look up and the shape would seem correct.
This
can be approximated by kneeling before the picture.
The
lines of the foreground recede to a single vanishing point, though not
accurately.
Uccello
may have been trying to use Alberti’s perspective theories.
The
horizon, incorrectly, does not appear at the height of the vanishing point.
This
might have looked more natural with the original arched tops.
Paolo
[Uccello]... discovered a method for standing his figures firmly on the
plane
of the floor while foreshortening them bit by bit, making them
recede
and diminish in proportion; formerly this was done
without
any set method... Paolo stayed up all night in his study,
and
when his wife called him to bed he would say: ‘
Oh,
what a lovely thing this perspective is!’ Vasari