Paolo Uccello

Paolo di Dono was born on June 15, 1397, in Pratovecchio, a small town in the Casentino valley east of Florence. His father, Dono di Paolo, worked as a barber and surgeon, and his mother, Antonia di Giovanni del Beccuto, came from a Florentine family of some standing ^[1]. The family connection to Florence shaped the boy's future: the city was then entering the most inventive period in its artistic history, and its workshops offered the best training available anywhere in Italy.

Around 1407, while still a child of about ten, Paolo entered the workshop of Lorenzo Ghiberti, the sculptor then at work on his first set of bronze doors for the Florence Baptistery ^[2]. The Ghiberti shop was a gathering point for young talent, and the years Paolo spent there placed him alongside artists who would define the century, including Donatello. Documents record him as a garzone, a shop assistant, receiving modest pay for his labor on the great bronze project ^[1].

By 1414 he had joined the Compagnia di San Luca, the painters' confraternity, and in 1415 he matriculated in the Arte dei Medici e Speziali, the Florentine guild that admitted painters ^[2]. The nickname Uccello, meaning bird, attached itself to him early. Giorgio Vasari, writing in the sixteenth century, explained that Paolo loved animals, kept painted images of birds and beasts in his house because he could not afford living ones, and filled his pictures with them ^[3]. Whatever the exact origin, the name stuck, and it is the one under which every Paolo Uccello biography has been written since.

The first major commission of Uccello's independent career took him away from Florence altogether. In 1425 he traveled to Venice to work as a mosaicist on the facade of the Basilica of San Marco, and he remained in the lagoon city for roughly five years ^[1]. Almost nothing of his Venetian work survives with certainty, though a figure of Saint Peter on the basilica facade has been attributed to him. The experience mattered nonetheless: mosaic demanded exactness in the placement of small parts within a large design, a discipline that suited his emerging cast of mind.

He returned to Florence around 1430 to find the city transformed. Filippo Brunelleschi had demonstrated the rules of linear perspective, Masaccio had applied them to painting before dying young, and Leon Battista Alberti was preparing the treatise that would codify the new method. Uccello absorbed these ideas with an intensity that became legendary. Vasari relates that he would stay up through the night working out vanishing points and foreshortenings, and that when his wife called him to bed he would answer that perspective was too sweet a thing to leave ^[3]. The anecdote may be embroidered, but the surviving drawings support its spirit: his studies of a chalice and a faceted ring, rendered as transparent wireframe forms, are among the earliest perspective constructions of such complexity on paper ^[4].

During the 1430s he painted frescoes on Old Testament subjects in the Chiostro Verde, the green cloister of Santa Maria Novella, so called because much of the work was executed in a green earth monochrome ^[2]. Scenes of the Creation from this campaign show him still working in an elegant late Gothic manner. He would return to the cloister years later a changed artist.

In 1436 the officials of Florence Cathedral commissioned Uccello to paint a memorial to Sir John Hawkwood, the English mercenary captain who had commanded Florentine armies in the previous century. The result, a fresco on the north wall of the nave, imitates a bronze equestrian statue seen from below, horse and rider in strict profile above a foreshortened sarcophagus ^[5]. Painted in terre verte to mimic weathered metal, it was a monument achieved through illusion rather than sculpture, and it announced that perspective could do the work of expensive bronze. The commission was prestigious enough that when his first attempt displeased the cathedral officials, they made him redo part of it ^[1]. He later designed a clock face for the cathedral's interior west wall and produced designs for stained glass in the drum of Brunelleschi's dome.

His most famous achievement came at mid century: three large panels showing the Battle of San Romano, a Florentine victory over Sienese forces won in 1432. The panels, painted for a member of the Bartolini Salimbeni family and later acquired, not entirely by consent, by Lorenzo de' Medici for the Palazzo Medici, are now divided among the National Gallery in London, the Uffizi in Florence, and the Louvre in Paris ^[6]. Broken lances lie on the ground in patterns that converge toward vanishing points, fallen soldiers are drawn in daring foreshortening, and rearing horses in pink and white turn combat into a kind of geometric pageant. The panels show better than any other works what Paolo Uccello achievements amounted to: not naturalism for its own sake, but the transformation of visual chaos into measurable order ^[4].

Alongside these public triumphs he returned to the Chiostro Verde around the 1440s and painted The Flood, a fresco of Noah's deluge compressed between two receding views of the ark. Figures cling to wreckage, a drowned child floats in the water, and the whole catastrophe rushes toward a single vanishing point ^[2]. Damaged as it is, the fresco has long been treated as his most powerful invention. Other surviving works include Saint George and the Dragon in London, The Hunt in the Forest at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, a nocturnal chase drawn into deep dark woodland, and a predella cycle on the profanation of the host painted in Urbino near the end of his life ^[6].

Uccello married Tommasa di Benedetto Malifici, and the couple had two children ^[1]. Their son Donato was born in 1453. Their daughter Antonia, born in 1456, became a Carmelite nun and was herself recorded as a painter, a rare distinction for a woman of that era; the register of her death in 1491 describes her as a pittoressa ^[7].

The personality that emerges from documents and from Vasari's account is that of a solitary, stubborn, and single-minded craftsman. Vasari claims that Donatello teased him for wasting effort on perspective puzzles, telling him he was leaving the certain for the uncertain ^[3]. The criticism reflected a real divide in Florentine art. Some contemporaries saw geometry as the servant of storytelling, while Uccello often seemed to treat storytelling as the servant of geometry. His pictures of mazzocchi, the faceted wooden hoops used in Florentine headgear, drawn purely as exercises in projection, suggest a man for whom the problem itself was the pleasure ^[4].

His fortunes were never large. Tax declarations he filed with the Florentine catasto trace a modest household, and in his final return of 1469 he wrote that he was old, without means of livelihood, and unable to work, with a wife who was ill ^[1]. Among Paolo Uccello facts, this late confession of poverty is one of the most frequently cited, a blunt record in the painter's own words.

Commissions thinned as taste in Florence shifted toward the softer naturalism of painters like Fra Filippo Lippi and, later, the generation of Botticelli. Uccello's insistent geometry and his lingering Gothic ornament began to look old fashioned to patrons in the 1450s and 1460s ^[2]. He continued to work, though at a slower pace and sometimes far from home.

Between 1465 and 1468 he was in Urbino with his son Donato, working for the Corpus Domini confraternity at the court of Federico da Montefeltro. There he painted the predella of the Miracle of the Profaned Host, six small scenes narrating a story of a Jewish moneylender and a stolen communion wafer, a subject that reflects the anti-Jewish preaching common in that period and that modern scholarship examines critically ^[6]. The little panels, still in Urbino, show his perspective interests intact: tiled floors, receding rooms, and night skies handled with the same care he had given to battle lances decades earlier.

He returned to Florence and lived his last years quietly. Paolo Uccello died in the city on December 10, 1475, at the age of seventy eight, and was buried in the church of Santo Spirito in his father's tomb ^[1]. A late painting sometimes connected with these final years, a Presentation of the Virgin or the strange Nocturnal Hunt in Oxford, shows that even in old age his imagination ran toward ordered depths and dark, measured spaces ^[4].

For centuries Uccello's reputation rested largely on Vasari's portrait of a lovable eccentric who ruined his talent by chasing vanishing points. That judgment has not survived modern scholarship. Twentieth century critics, and painters as well, found in his work something closer to prophecy than failure. His flattened pattern making, his horses like carved toys, and his insistence that a picture is first of all a constructed surface appealed strongly to artists of the modern movement, and writers on Cubism and abstraction repeatedly claimed him as an ancestor ^[7].

His influence on his own time was quieter but real. The Hawkwood fresco established a model for painted equestrian monuments that Andrea del Castagno answered directly on the same cathedral wall. The perspective drawings circulated as demonstrations of method, and Piero della Francesca, the supreme geometer among Renaissance painters, worked in a tradition Uccello helped to open ^[4]. The San Romano panels, hung today in three of the world's great museums, are among the most reproduced images of the fifteenth century and a fixture of every survey of Renaissance art ^[6].

Monographs by scholars including John Pope-Hennessy and Franco and Stefano Borsi have reconstructed the documented life behind the legends, though many attributions and dates remain debated because so much of his work is lost or damaged ^[7]. What endures is a singular achievement: a painter born into the ornamental world of the late Middle Ages who taught himself the mathematics of the new age and bent it to purposes entirely his own. Few artists of any period have made rigor look so strange, or strangeness so rigorous.