The Battle of San Romano
Paolo Uccello (1397 to 1475) · about 1435 to 1440
Horses rear, lances cross and a knight is unseated in a clash that looks less like war than a tournament staged on a stage. Uccello's panel shows the moment in 1432 when Florentine forces under Niccolo da Tolentino defeated the Sienese near San Romano in the Arno valley. Here the Sienese commander Bernardino della Ciarda is thrown from his white horse in the centre, while the armoured cavalry close in from both sides. The scene is one of three panels that once hung together; the other two are now in London and Paris. Broken lances lie on the ground in a neat grid, and behind the fight the hills carry on with hunting and farming as if nothing were happening.
Uccello was obsessed with perspective, and this painting is his laboratory. The fallen weapons form vanishing lines on the ground, a dead soldier on the left is foreshortened so sharply that his body becomes a study in geometry, and the horses are built from simple rounded volumes like toys. Much of the armour was originally covered in silver leaf, which has darkened, and the harnesses were gilded. Look for the oranges in the hedge behind, a Medici emblem, and for the fantastic hats the riders wear.
The three panels were painted for the Bartolini Salimbeni family and were later seized, almost by force, by Lorenzo the Magnificent for his palace on Via Larga, which is why the corners of the panels were cut to fit a new room. This one entered the Uffizi in the eighteenth century. It reminds you that early Renaissance Florence was a place of both mathematics and swagger. A memorable detail is the unseated Sienese leader, whose body still holds the shape of the saddle he has just lost.
Did You Know? Lorenzo de' Medici wanted all three panels so badly that he removed them from their owners' house and had them trimmed to fit his own room.
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