Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Paolo Uccello
Italian; 15th-century
London, England: The National Gallery
94%
The Battle of San Romano. c1440. Egg tempera with some oil on wood
Everything here — absolutely everything — appears to be pure surface, perfectly flat, yet perspective is lurking between each horse hoof and halberd, behind every lance. Somehow, this doesn't amount to so much decoration, but to a picture in all the modern senses: a virtual visual thing that rubs against its awkward self-knowledge of that virtuality. And yet the rubbing this picture does isn't strained, it's not combative. It communicates a comfort with its own limitations — the limitations of images as such — that can be disquieting to us today. That comfort is in the way the horses have been so blockishly modeled, in the paste-on garishness of ornaments like the commander's turban, in the ethereality of the pink-white foreground, in the rushed perspective of the fallen soldier. What we see in this painting is a medieval sensibility colliding, real-time, with the first possibilities of a modern mind. And yet Uccello seemed sanguine, collected. (TFS, 2025)
Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum
86%
Episodes from the Aeneid. c1470. Egg tempera, oil, and gold on wood panel
It would be a disservice to the graphic inventiveness of Uccello's art to say that its greatness is merely a matter of how well it figures a collision between the medieval mind and the modern. Yet this captures, however reductively, the essence of his art: there is an untroubled coexistence in his paintings of flatness and depth, of the bounded quietude of each figure in itself and the infinite motility of these figures altogether in their infinity of correlations. This painting, originally made for a cassone (fancy chest), is slightly weaker than, say, his famous San Romano three-piece, not only because of its smaller scale but also because it struggles somewhat to manage its busyness (which can feel somewhat dispersed) and because the ground on which its figures are set is comparatively unactivated (in the San Romano pieces there's a constant struggle between figures and grounds for organizational priority). It's worth noting that the profusion of rigging and vertical spears is a visual instantiation of Uccello's obsession with perspective: diegetic stand-ins for a painter's orthogonals. (TFS, 2026)
Paris, France: Musée Jacquemart-André
74%
Saint George and the Dragon. c1465. Tempera on panel
It could be argued that the limited interaction in this painting between its three foreground figures and their rigorously if not richly perspectival background is the purest, most reduced, and therefore the most aesthetically valuable instance of Uccello's formal program, which was to refuse (or fail) to integrate his figures completely into the mounting illusionistic reality of their worlds, such that impossible spaces and surfaces fester in between, say, a flatly crooked limb and the rapidly receding brown fields behind it. It could be argued, in other words, that this is a great Uccello, but that would be wrong. This painting lacks the frantic complexity of Uccello's best paintings, which register, in their refusal ever to congeal into a consistent image, the sense of yoked frustration and discovery he must have felt through his sleepless nights in his studio working to master perspective. In this painting, the graphic intrigue of the princess in profile and the sinuous dragon and the horse's heft is left mostly unconsummated by the general openness of the picture, and the regularity of the space behind these figures. (TFS, 2026)