The Battle of San Romano
Paolo Uccello (about 1397 to 1475) · probably about 1438 to 1440
A Florentine commander on a white horse, wearing an enormous gold and red hat, leads his cavalry into battle. Lances bristle, horses rear, a soldier lies flat in the foreground, and orange trees and rose hedges fill the background as if the fight were happening in a garden. The scene records a small victory of Florence over Siena at San Romano in 1432, and the man on the white horse is Niccolo da Tolentino, the Florentine general.
Uccello was famous for his obsession with perspective, and this painting is a demonstration piece. Notice the broken lances lying on the ground: they all point along lines running towards a single vanishing point, and the fallen soldier is foreshortened in the same grid, like a figure on a chessboard. The horses are painted as solid, rounded shapes, almost like toys, and the armour was originally covered with silver leaf that has since tarnished to grey. The fruit and flowers in the hedges were once bright and would have glittered against the dark ground.
The panel is one of three that together showed the whole battle; the other two are in the Uffizi in Florence and the Louvre in Paris. They hung in the Medici palace in Florence, where Lorenzo the Magnificent had them installed in his bedroom, and the tops were cut into an arched shape to fit. The National Gallery bought this panel in 1857. Look for the small hunting scene in the distant fields on the right, where hares and hounds race across the hills as if the battle were no concern of theirs.
Did You Know? Lorenzo de' Medici acquired the three panels by force and had the corners cut off so they would fit his bedroom wall.
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