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Paolo Uccello - Florentine Renaissance Painter

Paolo Uccello was a talented painter living in Florence, Italy in the fifteenth century. His obsession with properly using and mastering perspective principles in his works is no doubt his lasting legacy. His analytic realism combines with his geometrization of forms and helps provide an overall effect of abstraction in many of his works. Our collection of works include the Battle of San Romano, Saint George and the Dragon, Creation of the Animals and Creation of Adam, Creation of Eve and the Expulsion, Portrait of a Lady, Portrait of a Young Man, Mary's Presentation in the Temple, and Disputation of St. Stephen. There are also a number of paintings from his narrative and fairytale style in the Miracle of the Profaned Host series. We also included the four Prophets from the Florence Cathedral clockface

Paolo Uccello (1397 - December 10, 1475) was born Paolo di Dono in Florence. He was a Florentine painter of the early Renaissance who pioneered the use of perspective in art. He was also a student of mathematics and he portrayed people in three-dimensional space by using geometrical calculations to work out perspective foreshortening. His studies influenced great masters of the Renaissance like Leonardo da Vinci and Piero della Francesca.

Very little is known about Uccello’s early life, the only real source being a biography by Giorgio Vasari, written 75 years after the painter’s death.

When Uccello was only ten years old he was apprenticed to Lorenzo Ghiberti, one of the most influential sculptors of the Renaissance. Donatello was also an apprentice in the same workshop and the two artists became lifelong friends.

In 1414 Uccello was accepted as a member of the local painters’ guild and one year later he joined the official Florentine painters’ guild, the Arte dei Medici e degli Speziali. Unfortunately, none of his works from this period have survived. The earliest surviving works by the artist are some very badly damaged frescoes depicting scenes from the creation in the Green Cloister of Santa Maria Novella. Even so, the graceful lines bear witness to the artist’s future direction in the development of perspective.

In 1425 Paolo Uccello went to Venice to work on a commission for the mosaics that once decorated the buildings of San Marco. This work also, has not survived. In 1432 he received an invitation to work in Florence on a series of frescoes for local churches and private patrons. He would remain in Florence for the rest of his life.

Two years later Uccello’s next masterpiece, and the one in which his theories of perspective were first fully applied, was painted in 1436 for the Florence cathedral. It is a monochrome fresco of Sir John Hawkwood, an English mercenary who had been commander-in-chief of the Florentine army in its battles against the Viscount of Milan in the 1390s. The city-state of Florence had originally wanted to erect a bronze statue to their hero, but because it was too expensive, they commissioned Paolo Uccello to produce a painting that looked like a sculpture.

In 1447 Uccello painted one of his most important works, again in the Green Chapel of Santa Maria Novella. It is based on the Biblical tale of the Great Flood. The perspective used in this work is evidence of the artist’s analytic way of thinking and shows the influence of his friend and fellow artist Donatello, but more importantly shows the developing style of the Renaissance that was just emerging from the embers of the decorative Gothic style of painting.

Some time between 1450-1456 Paolo Uccello produced what is perhaps his best-known work, The Rout of San Romano, which depicts the victory of the Florentine army over their enemy, the city-state of Sienna in 1432. The three panels were produced for the Medici Palace in Florence. In this work, the battle is depicted as an almost unbelievable mesh of horses and riders tangled up with lancers and pennants in an abstract, geometrical landscape, unified by the use of color and foreshortening.

It is not known exactly when Paolo Uccello married Tomassa Malfici, but by 1453 they were certainly married because they had their first child, a boy named Donato, and three years later Uccello’s daughter Antonia, who would grow up to be a painter like her father, was born.

In his later years, Uccello became a recluse, a lonely old man afraid of the poverty he was facing. His wife Tomassa was ill and he was too old to paint. In November of 1475 Paolo Uccello drew up his will, and on December 10 of that same year he died at the Florence hospital. He was buried in his father’s tomb in Florence.

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