Paolo Uccello
Biography of Early Renaissance Artist, Famous For Skill in Linear Perspective, and Paintings "Battle of Romano" "Hunt in a Forest".

Battle of San Romano (c.1440)
Detail of Niccolo Mauruzi da Tolentino.

HISTORY
For an account of the evolution
of art in Italy during the 15th and
16th centuries, see:
Proto-Renaissance (c.1300-1400)
High Renaissance (1490-1530)
Mannerism (1530-1600)
Renaissance in Florence (Medici)
Renaissance in Rome (Papal)
Renaissance in Venice (Colour)

Paolo Uccello (1397-1475)

One of the most distinctive painters of the Early Renaissance, Florentine artist Paolo di Dono was nicknamed "Uccello" (bird) because of his paintings of birds and animals.

Younger than Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446), Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455), and Donatello (1386-1466), but older than Tommaso Masaccio (c.1401-28) and Piero della Francesca (1420-92), Uccello belonged to a generation of artists concerned with the general movement away from the flat decorative forms of the International Gothic style, towards naturalism. His work is characterized by an obsession with linear perspective, and a passion for clear colours and tapestry-like compositions. In his fine art painting, Uccello often creates a fairy-tale world of figures, animals and dramatic narrative.

Famous paintings by Uccello include: The Battle of San Romano (c.1456, tempera on panel, divided between the National Gallery London, the Uffizi Florence and the Louvre, Paris), The Flood (1446, fresco, Chiostro Verde, Santa Maria Novella, Florence), St George and the Dragon (c.1456, National Gallery, London), and the Miracle of the Desecrated Host (c.1467, Galleria Nazionale, Urbino).

ITALIAN RENAISSANCE ERA
Famous artists include:
Cimabue (c.1240-1302)
Giotto di Bondone (1267-1337)
Gentile da Fabriano (1370-1427)
Fra Angelico (1400-55)
Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72)
Andrea Mantegna (1430-1506)
Donato Bramante (1444-1514)
Alessandro Botticelli (1445-1510)
Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449-94)
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
Michelangelo (1475-1564)
Titian (1477-1576)
Raphael (1483-1520)
Jacopo Tintoretto (1518-1594)
Paolo Veronese (1528-1588)
Giambologna (1529-1608)
Caravaggio (1573-1610)

GREAT EUROPEAN PAINTERS
For biographies and paintings
see: Old Masters: Top 100.

LIST OF PAINTERS/SCULPTORS
For a list of artists from
the Quattrocento and
Cinquecento in Italy, see:
Early Renaissance Artists
High Renaissance Artists
Mannerist Artists.

WORLD'S BEST ART
For a list of the finest artworks:
Greatest Paintings Ever
Oils, watercolours, fresco
from Giotto to postmodernism.

COLOURS USED IN PAINTING
For an idea of the pigments
used by Paolo Uccello
in his colour painting, see:
Renaissance Colour Palette.

Biography

We know that by 1407 Uccello was apprenticed to Lorenzo Ghiberti, in whose workshop he remained until 1415, when he joined the guild of painters, the Arte de' Medici e Speziali. But further details of Uccello's early activity and art training are not clear. From 1425 until 1431 it is believed he was busy creating mosaic art at St Mark's in Venice, and was therefore away from Florence during the period when Masaccio was creating the important frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel (1425-8; S.Maria del Carmine, Florence).

Uccello's rapid absorption of the new ideas in Renaissance art when he returned to Florence in 1431 is demonstrated by his fresco painting of Sir John Hawkwood, completed in 1436 on the wall of Florence Cathedral. The foreshortening and modeling give the trompe-l'oeil impression that the fresco of this English mercenary leader is a statue - the painting was indeed a substitute for the sculptural effigy originally planned. Uccello's painting of Four Prophets of 1443 round the clock face of the cathedral further extends his experiments towards seemingly three-dimensional pictorial space.

In about 1445 Uccello painted The Flood in the Green Cloister of S.Maria Novella in Florence; here modeling, architectural recession, and light and shadow play important parts. The Flood may be seen as a visual interpretation of the theories expounded by Alberti in his treatise Della Pittura (On Painting) of 1436. Alberti's two basic principles of art - beauty derived from geometry, and decorative form as ornament - are fully realized in this work. Uccello contrasts young, old, clothed, and naked figures, birds, and animals as though to satisfy Alberti's demands in Della Pittura for a copious and varied composition. Both the recession to one vanishing point, and the strange doughnut-shaped collar worn by one of the figures in the foreground are characteristic of Uccello's interest in geometrically constructed space.

The Battle of San Romano

Uccello's greatest work consists of three panels, painted c.1456, representing The Battle of San Romano (now in the National Gallery, London; the Uffizi, Florence; and the Louvre, Paris). The work was commissioned by Cosimo de' Medici, and doubtless gave great pleasure to his seven-year-old grandson, Lorenzo, for it is a bloodless but action-packed battle scene depicting the triumph of the Florentine army over that of Siena in 1432. On another level, it serves to mark the power of the Medici banking family in Florentine finance and politics. Uccello's work is a magical combination of scientific perspective and festive love of incident and action. Broken lances serve both to suggest the melee of battle, and to act as perspective lines to lead the eye inward towards the horizon. In the London panel, a foreshortened, fallen knight and curved armour form part of the perspectival checkerboard of events. Uccelo has neatly dovetailed the new linear perspective with existing rules relating to the visual impression that warm colours (like red) jump forward, and cold colours (like blue or green) recede.

Other Masterpieces

St George and the Dragon (c.1455-60; National Gallery, London) uses similar, but less obvious, perspective tricks; the profiled princess still retains an elongated, Gothic quality. The painting is on canvas, rather than the more usual panel, indicating a change in taste: it is a portable possession of beauty, rather than a fixed devotional object. A Hunt in a Forest (1468; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), possibly Uccello's last work, is a veritable carnival in paint showing a hunting party. The movement of the animals is stylized, with their front legs raised and their back legs on the ground. This is a repetition of the formula used for the horses in The Rout of San Romano and St George and the Dragon paintings, and perfectly suggests their springiness.

Legacy

Uccello's lasting contribution to Early Renaissance painting was his ability to overlay basic quattrocento geometric structure with poetic detail, although the underlying logic is always visible.

Paintings by Paolo Uccello can be seen in some of the best art museums around the world.

• For biographies of great modern artists, see: Famous Painters.
• For profiles of the great artistic movements/periods, see: History of Art.
• For a chronological list of events, see: Timeline: History of Art.
• For more biographical details about famous painters, see: Art Encyclopedia.