Funerary Monument to Sir John Hawkwood
[3] The fresco has also been interpreted as a product of internal political competition between the Albizzi and Medici factions in Renaissance Florence, due to the latter's modification of the work's symbolism and iconography during its recommissioning.
[8] During the conflict, Hawkwood was paid 130,000 florins—which was extracted from local clergy, bishops, abbots, monasteries, and ecclesiastical institutions—to confine his activities to suppressing the rebellions in the Papal States, rather than directly attacking Florence.
So, therefore, although we consider it reflected glory on us and our people to keep the ashes and bones of the late brave and most magnificent captain John Hawkwood, who, as commander of our army, fought most gloriously for us and who at public expense was interred in the principal church of Santa Reparata ... nevertheless, according to the tenor of your request, we freely concede permission that his remains shall return to their native land.
[28] When such burials were not possible, frescoes were an acceptable substitute: Guidoriccio da Fogliano was painted on horseback by Simone Martini in Palazzo Pubblico in Siena in 1328; Pietro Farnese was depicted in a papier-mâché equestrian monument atop a sarcophagus in the Florence Cathedral in 1363.
[32][33] On August 20, 1393—when the Signoria, at the suggestion of Coluccio Salutati, voted to erect a marble statue of Hawkwood in the Duomo, "that brave men may know that the commune of Florence recompenses true service"—Hawkwood was liquidating his Tuscan properties and preparing to return to England.
[36] Hawkwood's March 20 funeral began in the Piazza della Signoria, continued to the Battistero di San Giovanni, where his body was placed on the baptismal font for public viewing, and culminated in the Cathedral, at a cost of 410 florins, not counting the substantial expenses of the Guilds.
[38] Painters Agnolo Gaddi and Giuliano Arrighi were selected by a committee to sketch directly onto the Duomo wall models for the Hawkwood and Farnese tombs.
[45] The instigators of the renewed project were the grandsons of Guido di Soletto del Pera Baldovinetti, one of the ambassadors who (unsuccessfully) pleaded with Hawkwood to return to Florence's service in 1389, and Donato Velluti, a 14th-century military and political historian.
[51] Around this time, documents attest to multiple repairs of a nearby window, opening the possibility that the original fresco had experienced water damage, and would have needed to be restored in any case.
[31] Yet Franco Borsi concludes that "undoubtedly under pressure from the Medici" the operai discarded their plans for a straightforward restoration of the Gaddi fresco and opted for a completely new monument.
[49] The choice of Paolo Uccello (born in Florence in 1397),[52] who had apprenticed for Lorenzo Ghiberti from June 1407, busying himself polishing the "Gates of Paradise", may have been an attempt to find a painter knowledgeable in bronze and statuary, which the fresco was to mimic.
[53][54] For centuries, art historians have regarded Uccello as a less-prominent artist at the time of the Hawkwood commission: he is not mentioned in the preface of Alberti's De Pictura, nor in Domenico Veneziano's 1438 letter to Piero di Cosimo de' Medici listing the major contemporary painters; nor have art historians even attempted to speculate that he studied the frescoes at the Brancacci Chapel.
[56] Similarly, all the works of Uccello's Venetian period are either missing or else of uncertain attribution: Uccello is thought to have made a no-longer-existing mosaic of St. Peter on the façade of St. Mark's Basilica, to have collaborated on the design of architectural structures for the mosaics in the Mascoli Chapel of St. Mark's by Michele Giambono, and possibly to have made some geometrical pattern decorations for the interior of St.
[61] Perhaps Uccello worked on the stories from the life of the Virgin and St. Stephen in the Chapel of Our Lady of the Assumption in the Prato Cathedral around 1435, although Pope-Hennessy, Pudelko, and Salmi[62] all dispute this attribution.
[63] Thus, the Florence Cathedral is the repository of all the extant works of Uccello whose attribution is firmly rooted in contemporary documents: two murals—the Hawkwood and the Clock Face with Four Heads of Prophets or Evangelists (1443)—and two stained glass windows—Resurrection (1443–1444) and Nativity (1443–1444).
For centuries, art historians have argued that the rejection was rooted in questions of perspective and color,[68] while more recent scholarship suggests it was the content of the fresco to which the capo maestro objected.
[71] A preparatory drawing in the Uffizi with the same static scene is the primary clue to the appearance of the original fresco, in which Hawkwood was apparently more armored, taller, and—along with his horse—in a more militaristic stance.
[73] A study which subjected the drawing to ultraviolet rays confirmed that Uccello had originally depicted Hawkwood as "more threatening", with his baton raised and horse "at the ready".
[74] The horse's proportions are based loosely upon those prescribed by Alberti in De equo animante, which in turn is based upon the anonymous Sonetto del Cavallo Perfetto;[75] however, in many ways the horse departs radically from Alberti's ideal of a harmonious and "lithe" creature in the style of Leonello d'Este's monument to Niccolò III d'Este, Arco del Cavallo in Ferrara.
[86] The inscription reads: "Ioannes Acutus[87] eques brittanicus dux aetatis suae cautissimus et rei militaris peritissimus habitus est" (John Hawkwood, British knight, most prudent leader of his age and most expert in the art of war).
[88] By classicizing the condottieri, the portrait may have represented an opportunity to—as Leonardo Bruni had advocated—"revive the ancient form of tribute" by choosing a "long-dead and uncontroversial subject".
[90] In fact, Cosimo may have allowed the former Albizzi project to go through merely to pave the way for a similar honor for Niccolò da Tolentino (died 1435), a condottiero whom the Medici would have favored over Hawkwood.
