Paolo Uccello

In his book Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Giorgio Vasari 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.

[1] Paolo worked in the Late Gothic tradition, emphasizing colour and pageantry rather than the classical realism that other artists were pioneering.

He has had some influence on twentieth-century art and literary criticism (e.g., in the Vies imaginaires by Marcel Schwob, Uccello le poil by Antonin Artaud and O Mundo Como Ideia by Bruno Tolentino).

Shortly afterwards, he painted three frescoes with scenes from the life of Saint Francis above the left door of the Santa Trinita church.

According to Vasari, people found this to be a great and beautiful achievement because this was the first example of how lines could be expertly used to demonstrate perspective and size.

As a result, this work became a model for artists who wished to craft illusions of space in order to enhance the realness of their paintings.

In that year, he proved his artistic maturity by painting episodes of the now-badly-damaged Creation and the Fall for the Green Cloister (Chiostro Verde) of Santa Maria Novella in Florence.

After he returned, Uccello remained in Florence for most of the rest of his life, executing works for various churches and patrons, most notably the Duomo.

The extraordinarily foreshortened forms extending in many planes accentuate Uccello's virtuosity as a draftsman, and provides a controlled visual structure to the chaos of the battle scene.

Uccello's predella is composed of six meticulous, naturalistic scenes related to the antisemitic myth of host desecration, which was based upon an event that supposedly occurred in Paris in 1290.

It has been suggested that the subject of the main panel, on which Duke Frederick of Montefeltro of Urbino appears in the background conversing with an Asian, is related to the antisemitic intention of the predella.

However, Federico did allow a small Jewish community to live in Urbino and not all of these scenes are unanimously attributed to Paolo Uccello.

[12]In his Florentine tax return of August 1469, Uccello declared, "I find myself old and ailing, my wife is ill, and I can no longer work."

With his precise and analytical mind, Paolo Uccello tried to apply a scientific method to depict objects in three-dimensional space.

"[14] The perspective in his paintings has influenced many famous painters, such as Piero della Francesca, Albrecht Dürer and Leonardo da Vinci, to name a few.

Saint George and the Dragon (c. 1470), showing Uccello's Gothic influences
A scene in Paolo Uccello's Corpus Domini predella (c. 1465–1468), set in a Jewish pawnbroker's home. Blood in the background emanates from the Host , which the moneylender has attempted to cook, and seeps under the door. This story first entered the Italian literary tradition via Giovanni Villani (c. 1280–1348) and his Nuova Cronica .
Clock in the Duomo, Florence
Marble mosaic showing a small stellated dodecahedron and a ring of hexagonal prisms , on the floor of St Mark's Basilica , Venice