Paolo Uccello

“ It is to a painter less mystical, but not less visionary, that we come in the work of Paolo Uccello, the great "Battle" (52) , of which two variants exist, one in the Louvre, the other, the most beautiful of the three, in the National Gallery. It is, as some have thought, a picture of the Battle of S. Egidio, where Braccio da Montone made Carlo Malatesta and his nephew Galeotto prisoners in 1416. Splendid as it is, something has been lost to us by restoration. Paola Uccello, the friend of Donatello and of Brunellesco, was all his life devoted to the study of perspective. ”

“ And that this is true we see from the fact that Florence produced in one and the same age Filippo, Donato, Lorenzo, Paolo Uccello, and Masaccio, each most excellent in his own kind, and thus not only swept away the rough and rude manners that had prevailed up to that time, but incited and kindled so greatly, by reason of the beautiful works of these men, the minds of those who came after, that the work of those professions has been brought to that grandeur and to that perfection which are seen in our own times. ”

“ A disciple of Paolo Uccello, he, like his master, affirmed that Perspective must be based on science. 'Geometry,' he said, 'being a part of mathematics, mother of all knowledge, is also the mother of drawing, which is the father of all the arts.' Complete knowledge and complete enjoyment of beauty were to him identical. Unlike Botticelli, and others of his kidney, Verrocchio was neither ravished by extraordinary beauty nor repelled by unusual deformity. ”

“ A weaker man like Paolo Uccello almost entirely sacrificed what sense of artistic significance he may have started with, in his eagerness to display his skill and knowledge. As for the rabble, their work has now the interest of prize exhibitions at local art schools, and their number merely helped to accelerate the momentum with which Florentine art rushed to its end. ”

“ When the opportunity is good they seize it, whatsoever its nature; encountering Saracens they slay them: so much towards Paradise; moving about in Italy they are not long in discovering the advantages offered by a condottiere's existence. They adopt and even perfect it, and after their death are magnificently buried in the cathedral of Florence, and Paolo Uccello paints their portrait on the wall. ”

“ As Paolo Uccello loved birds, so Gottfried Mind loved cats and became their special artist. He was born near the middle of the last century, in the town of Berne. There he lived, and there, in 1814, he died. Of poor and mean appearance, crabbed to all human kind, he was keenly alive to the ways and feelings, the tricks and graces of cat-kind. ”

“ Gardens please their eyes, and birds and beasts and insects. Whole menageries and aviaries, for instance, were painted by Paolo Uccello. Others, again, abandoned the old ground of Christian story for the tales of Greece and Rome; and not the least charming products of the time are antique motives treated with the freshness of romantic feeling. We look in vain for the allegories of the Giottesque masters: that stage of thought has been traversed, and a new cycle of poetic ideas, fanciful, idyllic, corresponding to Boiardo's episodes rather than to Dante's vision, opens for the artist. ”

“ It is not a museum of the arts; it is not a pantheon like Westminster Abbey or S. Croce; it is the beautiful house where God and man may meet and walk in the shadow.
Yet little though there be to interest the curious, Giovanni Acuto, that Englishman Sir John Hawkwood of the White Company, one of the first of the Condottieri, the deliverer of Pisa, "the first real general of modern times," is buried here. You may see his equestrian portrait by Paolo Uccello over the north-west doorway in his habit as he lived. ”

“ He undermined his constitution by breathing and handling corruption, and when his friends implored him to spare his health, he would answer, although unable to touch food for sickness, by paraphrasing the famous words of Paolo Uccello, and exclaiming from among his grisly and abominable properties, "Ah! how sweet a thing is not anatomy!" ”

“ Piero della Francesca was born about 1416 at the little town of Borgo San Sepolcro, just within the borders of Tuscany towards Arezzo. [124] He was a great student of perspective, a friend of mathematicians, of Fra Luca Paccioli, for instance, who later became the friend of Leonardo da Vinci. His work has force, and is always full of the significance of life. Influenced by Paolo Uccello, founding his work on a really scientific understanding of certain laws of vision, of drawing, his work seems to have been responsible for much that is so splendid in the work of Signorelli and Perugino. ”

“ Yet Mantegna never received the full complement of his knowledge from Squarcione. He was of an observing nature and probably studied Paolo Uccello and Fra Filippo, some of whose works were then in Paduan edifices. He gained color knowledge from the Venetian Bellinis, who lived at Padua at one time and who were connected with Mantegna by marriage. But the sculpturesque side of his art came from Squarcione, from a study of the antique, and from a deeper study of Donatello, whose bronzes to this day are to be seen within and without the Paduan Duomo of S. Antonio. ”

“ He had more science than either Paolo Uccello or Mantegna, both of them his contemporaries, the former older and the latter younger. Skilful in linear perspective, he fixed rectangular planes in perfect order and measured them, and thus got his figures in true proportional height. ”

“ This work is excellent for that time, but some doubt whether it ought to be ascribed to him; and it is inferior to his painting in the Carmine, of which we may say with Pliny, jam perfecta sunt omnia. The positions and foreshortenings of the figures are diversified and complete beyond those practised by Paolo Uccello. The air of the heads, says Mengs, is in the style of Raffaello; the expression is so managed that the mind seems no less forcibly depicted [Pg 75] than the body. The anatomy of the figure is marked with truth and judgment. ”

“ Masaccio, Paolo Uccello, Fra Giovanni, Fra Filippo, and other masters, native and foreign; and of a truth, these arts can only be acquired by means of long-continued study in drawing, with frequent and careful imitation or copying of works by good masters; he who is not supplied with these facilities to progress, however powerfully aided by natural dispositions, can never attain perfection till a large portion of his life has been spent. ”

“ We learn from history [66] that Antonio educated in Paolo Uccello, a great artist in perspective; and in Gherardo Starnina, a master in the gay style, of whom there are yet some remnants, in a chapel of [Pg 64] the church of Santa Croce. They are among the last efforts of the school of Giotto, which succeeding artists abandoned, to adopt a better manner. One exception occurs in Antonio Vite, who executed some works in the old style, in Pistoia, his native city, and in Pisa. ”

“ His skill as a physician equalled his diligence as a painter, for he gained an extensive experience in medicine from those who had employed him in their need, and he left behind him a high reputation in both arts. Antonio was a very graceful designer with the pen, and so excellent in chiaroscuro that some sheets of his in our book, in which he did the arch of S. Spirito, are the best of the age. Gherardo Starnini of Florence was a pupil of Antonio, and closely imitated him, while another pupil of his, Paolo Uccello, brought him no small credit. ”

“ Santa Maria Novella, then, is as good a German Italian church as can be found; but, for the reasons stated, it is not particularly interesting as a piece of architecture. Its wealth is in its frescos. In the quadrangle of the cloister is a series of pictures by Paolo Uccello, who, by the introduction of linear perspective, of which he is esteemed the inventor, made a new epoch in art. In the "chapel of the Spaniards" is a famous collection of frescos by Giotto's scholars. A large, thoughtful, and attractive composition is called the Wisdom of the Church. ”

“ Lorenzo Monaco, or Don Lorenzo, a master who occupies an intermediate position between the Giotteschi and the Quattrocento, is represented by the Mystery of the Passion (40) , a symbolical picture painted in 1404, of a type that Angelico brought to perfection in a fresco in San Marco; the Adoration of the Magi (39, the scenes in the frame by a later hand) , and Madonna and Saints (41) . The portrait of Giovanni dei Medici (43) is by an unknown hand of the Quattrocento. Paolo Uccello's Battle (52) is mainly a study in perspective. ”

“ Nanni d'Antonio di Banco, who died before him; and Rossellino, Desiderio, and Vellano da Padova. In short, it may be said that every man who has sought to do good work in relief since the death of Donato, has been his disciple. He was resolute in draughtsmanship, and he made his drawings with such mastery and boldness that they have no equals, as may be seen in my book, wherein I have figures drawn by his hand, both clothed and nude, animals that make all who see them marvel, and other most beautiful things of that kind. His portrait was made by Paolo Uccello, as it has been said in his Life. ”

“ Amico di Sandro, Andrea del Sarto, Fra Angelico, Bacchiacca, Fra Bartolommeo, Benozzo, Botticelli, Botticini, Bronzino, Bugiardini, Castagno, Credi, Franciabigio, Domenico and Ridolfo Ghirlandajo, Filippino and Fra Filippo Lippi, Lorenzo Monaco, Mainardi, Michelangelo, Orcagna, Pier di Cosimo, Pier Francesco Fiorentino, Antonio Pollajuolo, Pontormo, Cosimo Rosselli, Sellajo, Paolo Uccello, Domenico Veneziano, Verrocchio. ”

“ And if we do not always value a master the more as his art is more nearly complete, neither do we always value him especially who has placed new scientific conquests at the disposal of art. Palma Vecchio painted by the side of Titian, but he is only a minor master; Botticelli remained of the generation before Leonardo, but he is one of the immortal great. Paolo Ucello, by his study of perspective, made a distinct advance in pictorial science, but his interest for us is purely historic ”

“ Paolo is a married man. That mischievous urchin is his own first-born, who leans against the boat with his calves in deep water—as the calves of the rising generation are apt to be; his hard young hands are eager to help, his keen black eyes look for the signal. And that is Paolo’s wife—that broad-hipped woman with the full, free figure, who waits upon the beach with the swaddled infant in one arm and the year-old boy clinging to her skirt; all the other children play around, they are waiting to see father away. ”

“ There remain a superb nude study of Venus by Lorenzo di Credi, No. 3452—one of the pictures which escaped Savonarola's bonfire of vanities, and No. 1305, a Virgin and Child with various Saints by Domenico Veneziano (1400-1461) , who taught Gentile da Fabriano, the teacher of Jacopo Bellini. This picture is a complete contrast to the Uccello: for that is all tapestry, richness, and belligerence, and this is so pale and gentle, with its lovely light green, a rare colour in this gallery. ”

“ In Italy I can add to the reputation he owns already in England! I want his name to blacken and blister wherever it is spoken! That’s why!”
The count made an exclamation, as through his fevered blood the idea of the truth raced swiftly. The town loungers had gaped at the osteria to see the carousal of the milord—so Paolo had said. Why, it was as good as a play! He smiled—and thought further:
The Englishman had been in Ravenna and had eluded his grasp. Here before him was youth, clever and unscrupulous; if less cunning, yet bolder—a hatred antedating his own—a ready tool. ”

“ It is a solid, six-roomed place, about fifty years old, having been rebuilt by Paolo's uncle. Here we came to live for a time with the Fiori, Maria and Paolo, and their three children, Giovanni and Marco and Felicina.
Paolo had inherited, or partly inherited, San Gaudenzio, which had been in his family for generations. He was a peasant of fifty-three, very grey and wrinkled and worn-looking, but at the same time robust, with full strong limbs and a powerful chest. His face was old, but his body was solid and powerful. His eyes were blue like upper ice, beautiful. ”

“ Paolo's teacher stood by, and nodded approvingly as his little fingers played so deftly with the clay, his face all lighted up with joy at this strange kind of a school-lesson.
After that he had a new and faithful friend, and, as he worked away, putting his whole young soul into the tasks that filled it with radiant hope, other friends, rich and powerful, found him out in his slum. They brought better-paying work for his mother than sewing pants for the sweater, and Uncle Pasquale abandoned the scows to become a porter in a big shipping-house on the West Side. ”

“ Still he lingered, as if something more must be spoken, although Fra Paolo had already sent to summon his secretary. "I also," he said, asserting himself, with an effort which was always painful to his gentle soul, "I also would be faithful to my conscience and my vow; that which I believe—I can teach no other."
"More can one not ask of thee," Fra Paolo answered, suddenly unbending from the stilted mood of his last words. "By the light that is given him must each man choose his path." ”