Paolo Uccello, notable for his pioneering work…

Paolo Uccello, notable for his pioneering work on visual perspective in art, completes his most famous paintings, three battle scenes executed from 1450 to 1455, in which brightly and irrationally colored equestrian figures battle before a tapestry-like backdrop, depicting events that took place at the battle of San Romano in 1432.

An ingenious practitioner of the art of perspective, Uccello carefully arranges fallen horses, riders, and broken lances along horizontal and diagonal lines that establish a grid-like perspective system.

Preoccupied throughout his career with the effects of foreshortening and the mechanics of rendering architectural space, he accentuates these characteristics to such a degree that his paintings—in contrast, for example, to those of his contemporary, the late Masaccio—never appear to be extensions of reality.