Paolo Uccello, commissioned in 1436 to paint…

Paolo Uccello, commissioned in 1436 to paint a posthumous equestrian monument of the famous English mercenary soldier Sir John Hawkwood for Florence Cathedral, creates an extraordinary fresco portraying a monumental stone statue; the pedestal is seen from below, but the horse and rider are seen from the side.

Florence’s Gothic cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore is consecrated in 1436.

The ideal church type of the age is based on the centralized plan, admired by architects and theoreticians for its geometrical purity and clarity (and thus to heavenly order), and directly exemplified by Florentine sculptor-architect Filippo Brunelleschi's remarkable 1434 design for the first centrally planned church of the Renaissance, Florence’s vast (and still unfinished) Santa Maria degli Angeli (also called the Duomo of Florence): a domed octagon with eight radiating chapels.

His centralized plan, formed by a ring of eight piers, becomes the ideal among his Florentine contemporaries and his followers in Rome.

In 1436, he begins the church of Santo Spirito, using such traditional Italian Romanesque elements as a basilican plan, round arches, and a flat ceiling, but combines these with a new sense of proportion, the use of Corinthian columns, and a dome over the crossing of nave and transepts.

Italian polymath Leone Battista Alberti had moved in 1434 to Florence, becoming a member of the inner circle of humanists in Tuscany, among them the sculptor Donatello, and has gained recognition as an authority on art and classical literature.

He has become especially interested in the work of Brunelleschi, to whom he dedicates the Italian edition of Della pittura (On Painting), a treatise on the theory and technique of painting published in 1436, in which the author sets forth all that is currently known on the subject.

(Alberti had dedicated the 1435 Latin edition to Gian Francesco Gonzaga of Milan.)