Paulo Uccello
(1397 - 1475) |
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Art Work
| Name: |
Paulo Uccello |
| Gender: |
Male |
| Place of Birth: |
Florence, Italy |
| Nationality: |
Italian |
| Birth: |
1397 |
| Death: |
1475 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
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| Method: |
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| Style: |
Early Renaissance |
| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Painting
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Biography
| In the past, some critics derided Uccello, accusing him of sacrificing art in the name of dry illustrations of the perspective theories of his day. More recently, he has been recognized as a major designer-artist (he also worked in mosaic and stained glass) whose work cleverly blends decorative and artistic values. He has even been credited with re-examining the way people view the world, in an approach anticipating that of the cubists. Certainly his oeuvre epitomizes a major artistic conflict of his day: contrived Gothic-style design versus Renaissance ways of representing reality. The young Uccello was the son of a barber-surgeon. He was artistic from childhood and began his career in the Florentine workshop of sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti, designer of the beautiful bronze doors for the baptistery of Florence Cathedral. Uccello spent most of his life in Florence, establishing himself there professionally by around 1415. Details of his early career are sketchy, but from 1425 he was in Venice for a few years, working as a mosaicist. In the 1430s he was back in Florence, where he produced the Creation frescoes for the church of Santa Maria Novella, which retain a strongly decorative element. By this time he had turned increasingly to the pioneering ideas of his contemporaries Filippo Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti–artists who had devised a precise, mathematical way of representing a threedimensional world on a two-dimensional painted surface. Uccello's portrait of Sir John Hawkwood (1436) shows a strong interest in perspective. Better was to come. In a fresco depicting the biblical flood and its recession, Uccello used perspective to show two scenes in one. His three famous Battle of San Romano paintings {late 1430s-1450s) involve an intensely planned perspective! scheme in which each element was carefully set. The pictures, which apparently hung side by side in the Medics' Florentine palace, combine bright patterning and careful design in a medieval style with the sculptural and spatial ideas of Renaissance art. Uccello seems to have worked into old age and to have died from general infirmity. Tradition has it that he spent his latter years as an impoverished recluse, obsessed with perspective experiments that kept him awake all night. |
Samples of Work
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