Great Masters

Uccello was in fact considered as one of the creators of the Euclidean system of perspective that has been characterising the representation of space from the end of the 15th Century until 1900.

Perspective was his obsession and it seemed that he was reluctant to show his paintings for fear of being rejected by his contemporaries.

Berenson, a famous art critic who went as far as claiming that he was a bad painter, all the more considered Uccello as a "naturalist" artist.

No one knows exactly who Uccello (his name means bird) was. The walls of his house were reportedly painted with birds, thus his name. According to some authors, he nurtured a passion for birds, a fact that would also explain his name.

We however know that he started to work as an apprentice at about ten with Ghiberti when this artist was achieving the second door of the Baptistery of Florence in 1407. It was assumed that Uccello took the opportunity of getting acquainted with the notions of the new perspective system that Alberti, a mathematician, Brunelleschi and Ghiberti, both architects and sculptors, were then applying.

It is also known that Uccello studied painting with Gherardo Starnina since he help him produce the frescoes of the Lippi and Macia Tabernacle in 1416. Uccello joined the St Luke Guild in 1424 and worked a year later as a mosaicist in the church of San Marco in Venice. He notably produced for the church entrance a mosaic work representing Saint Peter, now lost but known through a painting by Gentile Bellini.

It was during his stay in Venice that Uccello combined the representation of late Gothic models with revolutionary spatial effects.

Back in Florence in 1431, he painted two frescoes «The Creation of Adam and of the Animals» and «The Creation of Eve and the Fall from Eden» for the cloister of the Santa Maria Novella church.

In 1436 he painted the equestrian representation of Giovanni Acuto (The English condottiere John Hawkwood) in the cathedral of Florence, a work of importance in his career.

In 1443, Uccello worked again for the cathedral of Florence, decorating the big clock with four heads of prophets and producing from 1443 until 1445 designs for stained-glass works showing the Nativity and the Resurrection. In 1447, he painted a fresco representing the Deluge in Santa Maria Novella. Two scenes of the life of Noah have been preserved while two other were destroyed in the flood, which devastated Florence in 1966. It was around 1447 that Uccello was believed to have produced the painting called “The Five Founders of Renaissance Art” now in the Louvre Museum.

There is no solid proof of the authenticity of that work and experts only assume that Uccello painted it. Besides representing himself, he painted the full-size portraits of Antonio Manetti, the mathematician with whom he studied geometry, Giotto, considered as the inventor of relief, Brunelleschi the architect, as the exponent of perspective and new proportions and his friend Donatello, who interpreted the ratio of volumes in space.

Fra Angelico, who worked under Gothic influences nor Masaccio were represented in this important painting.

Between 1445 and 1448, Uccello went to Padua and painted a series of paintings called the “Giants” in the Vitaliani House but these works, which much impressed Mantegna, were eventually destroyed.

Uccello, Paolo
"The Rout of San Romano", c. 1456
National Gallery, London

The Painting of the “Battle of San Romano battle” in the Louvre appears to be more compact and sombre in comparison to those, which are exhibited in Florence and in London. The battle between knights wearing armours and fighting on horses is being shown on the forefront of the scene in a tight space where all figures are being represented in a new geometric manner though the background keeps a somewhat mediaeval touch regarding perspective.

Still, Uccello managed to construct a kind of extraordinary scramble mixing the legs of soldiers with those of horses among spears, helmets and all kinds of weapons and assembling a well composed geometric scene that heralded the works of Caravaggio and later of Cubist painters, notably Chirico.

There was something very much synthetic in the vision of Uccello who found an ideal alibi in the representation of this battle with fighters and horses looking like robots which would surely fit admirably in a modern scene and even in a film like “Star War”.

In addition, the artist employed strange colours, painting certain horses in blue or orange with blue fields and red towns, a fact suggesting some great freedom among primitive painters regarding the use of colours in order to differentiate and to decorate subjects rather than to identify them.

Research works have also demonstrated that Uccello used these coloured contrasts to differentiate the spaces occupied by figures while he felt free to believe that these corresponded with what he really wanted to express.

It must be recalled that Uccello used such variety of colours in his early works in a manner reminiscent of that of Carpaccio and Gentile Bellini who also used sumptuous gold and red colours on sombre backgrounds suggesting that perspective was not his sole preoccupation.

At the end of his life, Uccello devoted much of his time to mathematics and his Predella, though painted according Middle Age requirements, included many geometric combinations which were to be only used again several centuries later by Chirico and several Surrealist artists. In one of the compartments of the Predella representing a room, the walls, the beams of the ceiling and the tiling on the floor are completely giving away on the right side of the scene in which a group of little girls with flamboyant hair seem much frightened between their elder sister and a young man dressed in red clothes and looking both quite embarrassed.

After 1467-68, Uccello became more involved in his mathematics studies and no longer painted major works, except “The Hunt”, now in the Ashmolean Museum of Oxford. Once again, the repartition of figures and animals painted in vibrant colours by Uccello appeared to be very close to that expressed by Carpaccio and Bellini in their works.

In “The Hunt”, measuring 65 x 165 cm, the scene painted by Uccello offered many similarities with those of “The Battle of San Romano” while the artist created a strange and unnatural light in confronting violent colours against a much nocturnal-like background.

In most of Uccello's paintings, the viewer usually faces difficulties in trying to understand how light beaming on figures and certain elements is oriented. The artist never tried to interpret the effect of light and instead sought to recreate them at will, notably through the reciprocal confrontation of colours.