Paolo Uccello

Lorenzo Ghiberti, a Florentine painter and metalworker, has learned from his goldsmith stepfather, and from studying the works of northern artists, the techniques of working with metals in the Late Gothic style.

The twenty-year-old Ghiberti had in 1401 adapted antique Roman figural naturalism in “Abraham and Isaac,” his proposed bronze reliefs for the Florence Baptistery door commission.

Winning the commission over Filippo Brunelleschi, Jacopo della Quercia, and others, Ghiberti commences work two years later on the twenty-eight bronze high reliefs for the first set of doors, blending innovative Renaissance features with elements drawn from the Late Gothic or International Style.

The original plan had been for the doors to depict scenes from the Old Testament, and the trial piece was the sacrifice of Isaac.

However, the plan is changed to depict scenes from the New Testament instead.

To fulfill this commission, Ghiberti sets up a large workshop in which many artists are to train, including Masolino, Uccello, Micelozzo, Antonio Pollaiuolo, and the gifted twenty-year-old Florentine sculptor Donato di Niccolo di Bette Bardi, called Donatello.

(The doors currently on display today are a reproduction; the actual doors occasionally travel to various world-class museums.)

Piero di Giovanni, a Siena-born painter and miniaturist who had acquired the name Lorenzo the Monk on entering the Camaldolese monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Florence in 1391, paints his Christ as Man of Sorrows in 1404 in the International Gothic style of the late fourteenth century.

His work also shows the influence of the Sienese school.

Italian painter Paolo Uccello, born Paolo di Dono, begins to work in Florence in 1407.

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.)

Alesso Baldovinetti, apprenticed as a youth to Domenico Veneziano and influenced by Fra Angelico, has made important contributions to landscape painting.

The Florentine painter and mosaicist has won renown for his elegant Annunciation, painted in 1447, and the Madonna and Child painted around the same time, when he is about thirty-five.

A follower of the group of scientific realists and naturalists in art which includes Andrea del Castagno, Paolo Uccello and Domenico Veneziano, Baldovinetti uses precisely drawn elongated figures and subtle gradations of tone and light to produce paintings that combine sophistication and naiveté.

Paolo Ucello paints frescoes of The Flood in the Green Cloister of Santa Maria Novella in the late 1440s manipulating the effects of perspective to the extreme.

Cosimo de'Medici’s sponsorship of the Platonic Academy in Florence, founded after Gemistus Pletho had reintroduced Plato's thoughts to Western Europe during the 1438 - 1439 Council of Florence, marks a shift in humanist values from political and social concerns to speculation about the nature of humankind and the cosmos.

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.

Paola Uccello completes his last major commission in 1469, the predella for the altar of the Confraternity of the Holy Sacrament at Urbino, for which Joos van Ghent provides the main panel.

Uccello also executes many careful drawings of objects rendered in perspective.

Despite his genius, however, he will die poor and neglected on December 10, 1475.