Paolo Uccello

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Paolo Uccello (born Paolo di Dono, 1397 – December 10, 1475) was a Florentine painter who was notable of visual perspective in art. Giorgio Vasari in his book Lives of the Artist wrote that Uccello was obsessed by his interest in perspective and would stay up all night in his study trying to grasp the exact vanishing point. He used perspective in order to create a feeling of depth in his paintings and not, as his contemporaries, to narrate different or succeeding stories.

His best known works are the three paintings representing the battle of San Romano (for a long time these were wrongly entitled the "Battle of Sant' Egidio of 1416").

Paolo worked in the Late Gothic tradition, and emphasized colour and pageantry rather than the Classical realism that other artists were pioneering. His style is best described as idiosyncratic, and he left no school of followers. He had some influence on twentieth century art and literary criticism.

Life

The sources for Paolo Uccello’s life are few: Giorgio Vasari’s biography, written 75 years after Paolo’s death, and a few contemporary official documents.

Uccello was born in Florence in 1397. His nickname Uccello came from his fondness for painting birds. His father, Dono di Paolo, was a barber-surgeon from Pratovecchio near Arezzo, his mother’s name was Antonia. From 1407, aged ten, he was apprenticed to the famous sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti’s workshop, the premier centre for Florentine art at the time, where he began a lifelong friendship with Donatello. Ghiberti would have a great influence on him by his late-Gothic, narrative style and sculptural composition. In 1415 Uccello was admitted to the painters' guild Compagnia di San Lucca. By 1424 he was earning his own living as a painter. In that year he painted Creation and expulsion in the church Santa Maria Novella in Florence, proving his artistic maturity. Around this time he was taught geometry by Manetti.

In 1425 Uccello travelled to Venice, where he worked on the mosaics for the façade of San Marco. Some suggest he visited Rome with Donatello before returning to Florence in 1431. He had also painted before some frescoes in Prato and Bologna. In 1432 the Office of Works asked the Florentine ambassador in Venice to enquire after Uccello’s reputation as an artist. Uccello remained in Florence for most of the rest of his life, executing works for various churches and patrons, most notably the Duomo. In 1436 he was given the commission for the monochromatic fresco of Sir John Hawkwood. In this equestrian monument he showed his keen interest in perspective. The condottiere and his horse are presented as if the fresco was a sculpture, seen from below.

If, as is widely thought, he is the author of the frescoes Stories of the Virgin and Story of Saint Stephen in the Cappella dell'Assunta, Florence, then he would have visited nearby Prato sometime between 1435 and 1440.

In 1443 He painted the figures on the clock of the Duomo. In the same year and in 1444 he designed a few stained glass windows for the same church. In 1444 he is also at work in Padua.

In 1445 he travelled to Padua at Donatello’s invitation.

Back in Florence in 1446, he painted the Green Stations of the Cross, again for the cloister of the church Santa Maria Novella. Around 1447–1454 he painted Scenes of Monastic Life for the church San Miniato al Monte, Florence.

Around 1450–1456 he painted his three most famous paintings The Battle of San Romano, the victory of the Florentine army over the Sienese in 1432, for the Palazzo Medici in Florence. The daring perspectival form gives an appearance of depth to the battle scene.

Uccello was married to Tomassa Malifici by 1453, because in that year Donato (named after Donatello) was born, and in 1456 his wife gave birth to Antonia.

In 1465 Uccello was in Urbino with his son Donato, where he was engaged until 1469 working for the congregation of Santo Sacramento. He painted a predella with the Miracle of the Profaned Host for an altarpiece.

In his Florentine tax return of August 1469 he declared: “I find myself old and ailing, my wife is ill, and I can no longer work.” In has last years, he was a lonesome, forgotten man, afraid of hardship in life.

His last known work is The Hunt, c. 1470.

He died at the age of 78 in 1475 and was buried in his father’s tomb in the Florentine church of Santo Spirito.

With his precise, analytical mind he tried to apply a scientific method to depict objects in three-dimensional space. In particular, some of his studies of the perspective foreshortening of the torus are preserved, and he realised the thus acquired insights in his paintings in form of the mazzocchio. The perspective in his paintings has influenced famous painters such as Piero della Francesca, Albrecht Dürer and Leonardo da Vinci, to name a few.

His daughter Antonia Uccello (1446–1491) was a Carmelite nun, whom Giorgio Vasari called "a daughter who knew how to draw". She was even noted as a "pittoressa", a paintress, on her death certificate. Her style and her skill remains as mystery as none of her work is extant.

Works

Pope-Hennessy is far more conservative than the Italian authors: he attributes some of the works below to a "Prato Master" and a "Karlsruhe Master". Most of the dates in the list (taken from Borsi and Borsi) are derived from stylistic comparison rather than documentation.

• Annunciation (c. 1420–1425) - Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
• Creation and Fall (c.1424–1425) - Lunette and lower section, Chiostro Verde, Santa Maria Novella, Florence
• Adoration of the Magi (c. 1431–1432) - Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe
• St George and the Dragon (c. 1431) - National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
• Quarate Predella (c. 1433) - Museo Arcivescovile di Castello, Florence
• Frescoes in the Capella dell' Assunta (c. 1434–1435) - Duomo, Prato
• Nun-Saint with Two Children (c.1434–1435) - Contini-Bonacosi Collection, Florence
• Equestrian Monument to John Hawkwood (c. 1436) - Duomo, Florence
• The Battle of San Romano, consisting of:

• Battle of San Romano: Niccolò da Tolentino (c. 1450–1456) - National Gallery, London
• Battle of San Romano: Bernadino della Ciarda unhorsed (c. 1450–1456) - Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
• Battle of San Romano: Micheletto da Cotignola (c.1450) - Musée du Louvre, Paris

• St George and the Dragon (c. 1439–1540) - Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris
• Clock Face with Four Prophets/Evangelists (1443) - Duomo, Florence
• Resurrection (1443-1444) - stained glass window, Duomo, Florence
• Nativity (1443-1444) - stained glass window, Duomo, Florence
• Story of Noah (c. 1447) - lunette and lower section, Chiostro Verde, Santa Maria Novella, Florence
• Scenes of Monastic Life (c. 1447–1454) - S. Miniato al Monte, Florence
• Saint George and the Dragon (c. 1470) - National Gallery, London
• Crucifixion (c. 1457–1458) - Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid
• Life of the Holy Fathers (c. 1460–1465) - Accademia, Florence
• Miracle of the Profaned Host (1467–1468) - predella, Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Palazzo Ducale, Urbino)
• The Hunt in the Forest (c. 1470) -- Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

 

Further reading

• Giorgio Vasari's life of Paolo Uccello translated by George Bull in Lives of the Artists, Part 1. Penguin Classics, 1965.

• D'Ancona, Paola. Paolo Uccello. New York: McGraw Hill, 1961.
• Barolsky, Paul. "The Painter Who Almost Became a Cheese" Virginia Quarterly Review, 70/1 (Winter 1994).
• Borsi, Franco & Stefano. Paolo Uccello. London: Thames & Hudson, 1994. (a massive monograph)
• Borsi, Stefano. Paolo Uccello. Art Dossier. Florence: Giunti, nd.
• Carli, Enzo. All the Paintings of Paolo Uccello. The Complete Library of World Art. London: Oldbourne, 1963. (originally published in Italian in the 1950s)
• Paolieri, Annarita. Paolo Uccello, Domenico Veneziano, Andrea del Castagno. Library of Great Masters. New York: SCALA/Riverside, 1991.
• Pope-Hennessy, John. Paolo Uccello: Complete Edition. 2nd ed. London: Phaidon, 1969. (the other important English-language monograph)

External links

• Excerpts from Vasari's Life of Paolo Uccello
• Web Gallery of Art: Paolo Uccello
• Florence Art Guide: Paolo Uccello
• Paolo Uccello Homepage (in Italian)
• Paolo Uccello's Polyhedra
• Ron Schuler's Parlour Tricks: Getting Some Perspective

See also

• List of painters
• List of Italian painters
• List of famous Italians

This article incorporates text from the public domain Catholic Encyclopedia.