Five Masters of the Florentine Renaissance: Giotto, Uccello, Donatello, Manetti and Brunelleschi
Unknown · c. 1500-1550
Five heads are set side by side on a long narrow panel, each identified by name: Giotto the painter, Paolo Uccello the painter who loved perspective, Donatello the sculptor, Antonio Manetti the mathematician, and Filippo Brunelleschi the architect of the cathedral dome. They are the founders of Florentine art as the sixteenth century saw them, painted in sober colours against a plain ground like a row of ancient portrait busts.
Vasari, in his life of Uccello, describes a long panel of exactly these five men that the painter kept in his house, and when this picture was sold in Paris at the Stevens sale in eighteen forty seven it was catalogued as Uccello's own work; the Louvre bought it there. The museum now dates it to the first half of the sixteenth century and considers it the work of an anonymous Florentine painter, probably based on the lost original or on the portrait tradition it started. Whatever its author, it is a rare document of how Florence commemorated its artists as heroes, a century before such galleries of famous men became common.
Did You Know? Vasari wrote that Paolo Uccello kept a long panel with the portraits of five famous men in his house, and for a long time this was believed to be it.
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