Paolo Uccello

Paolo Uccello (born Paolo di Dono, 1397–1475) was a Florentine painter and mathematician active during the Italian Renaissance, best remembered for his early experiments with visual perspective. According to Giorgio Vasari, Uccello was so consumed by perspective that he would spend entire nights in his study trying to pin down the exact vanishing point. He used this technique to give his paintings a sense of depth. His most famous works are three panels depicting the battle of San Romano, long misidentified as the Battle of Sant'Egidio of 1416. Uccello worked within the Late Gothic tradition, favoring vivid color and spectacle over the classical realism pursued by some of his contemporaries. His style was highly individual, and he founded no school of followers. Still, his work later influenced twentieth-century art and literary criticism, appearing in works by Marcel Schwob, Antonin Artaud, and Bruno Tolentino.

Uccello was likely born in 1397 in Pratovecchio, near Arezzo, where his father, Dono di Paolo, worked as a barber-surgeon. His mother, Antonia, came from a high-ranking Florentine family. His nickname, Uccello, meaning "little bird," came from his habit of painting birds. Between 1412 and 1416, he apprenticed with the celebrated sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti, whose workshop was the leading artistic center in Florence at the time. Ghiberti’s late-Gothic narrative style and sculptural compositions left a strong mark on Uccello. Around this time, he also began a lifelong friendship with Donatello. In 1414, Uccello joined the painters’ guild, Compagnia di San Luca, and a year later, the official Florentine painters’ guild, Arte dei Medici e degli Speziali. Though he likely left Ghiberti’s workshop by the mid-1420s, he remained on good terms with his former master and may have seen the designs for Ghiberti’s second set of Baptistery doors, The Gates of Paradise. One battle scene in particular may have stayed with him and influenced his own Battle of San Romano.

Vasari records that Uccello’s first painting was a Saint Anthony between Saints Cosmas and Damianus for the hospital of Lelmo. He then painted two figures in the convent of Annalena, followed by three frescoes of Saint Francis’s life above the left door of Santa Trinita. For Santa Maria Maggiore, he painted a fresco of the Annunciation featuring a large building with columns rendered in perspective. Vasari notes that viewers praised this work as a great achievement, since it was the first clear demonstration of how lines could create the illusion of perspective and scale. It became a model for artists seeking to make their paintings feel more spatially real. Uccello also painted the Lives of the Church Fathers in the cloisters of San Miniato, a church on a hill overlooking Florence. According to Vasari, he grew tired of the abbot’s monotonous meals of cheese pies and cheese soup, ran away, and only returned after the abbot promised him a more varied diet.

For the Medici household, Uccello painted several scenes of animals in distemper. Vasari especially admired a depiction of a fierce lion battling a snake that spits venom. Uccello loved painting animals and kept many pictures of them at home, particularly birds—a passion that earned him his nickname, Paolo Uccelli (Paul of the birds). By 1424, he was earning a living as a painter. That year, he demonstrated his artistic maturity with episodes of the Creation and the Fall for the Green Cloister of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, now badly damaged. The assignment let him paint many animals in a lively way, and he also succeeded in painting trees in natural colors, a skill many earlier painters had found difficult. This work helped build his reputation for landscape painting. He followed it with Scenes from the Life of Noah, also for the Green Cloister, which brought him great fame in Florence.

In 1425, Uccello traveled to Venice to work on mosaics for the façade of San Marco, all of which have since been lost. He also painted frescoes in Prato Cathedral and Bologna. Some sources suggest he visited Rome with Donatello before returning to Florence in 1431. After that, he spent most of his remaining years in Florence, working for various churches and patrons, especially the Duomo. Even during his absence, interest in him remained strong: in 1432, the Office of Works asked the Florentine ambassador in Venice to inquire about Uccello’s reputation. In 1436, he received a commission for a monochromatic fresco of Sir John Hawkwood, an equestrian monument that showcased his intense interest in perspective—the condottiere and his horse appear as if they are a sculpture viewed from below. He is widely believed to have painted the frescoes Stories of the Virgin and Story of Saint Stephen in Florence’s Cappella dell’Assunta, which suggests he visited nearby Prato between 1435 and 1440. In 1443, he painted the figures on the clock of the Duomo.