around 1397 -1475 · Florence, Venice and early Renaissance

Scholarly perspective, precious colors and chivalrous imagination make Paolo Uccello a major experimenter of the early Florentine Renaissance.

Paolo di Dono, known as Paolo Uccello, was born in Florence around 1397 and died there in 1475. Trained in the workshop of the sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti between around 1407 and 1414, he learned precise drawing, relief and a taste for precious surfaces. He then worked in Venice as a mosaicist before returning to Florence. Uccello belongs to a generation that discovered the possibilities of linear perspective. He then made it less an invisible rule than a spectacle: gridded floors, broken spears, architecture and shortened bodies organize space with almost geometric rigor. This research culminates in the three panels of the Battle of San Romano, painted around 1438 - 1440, where the tumult military becomes an orderly scene, shining with gold and silver. Its religious subjects show the same tension between Gothic tradition and new space. In The Annunciation, architecture leads the gaze towards the meeting of the angel and the Virgin. The Adoration of the Magi multiplies the figures, the horses and the presents without renouncing clarity. On the contrary, its Crucifixions concentrate the pain around the vertical of Christ. In Uccello, perspective never cools the image: it makes the marvelous visible. The "Paolo Uccello" selection, on the contrary, focuses the pain around the vertical of Christ. In Uccello, perspective never cools the image: it makes the marvelous visible. The "Paolo Uccello" selection, on the contrary, compares Adoration of the Magi and The Annunciation. Its reading favors details.

Uccello transforms perspective into concrete poetry: a spear, a floor or a wing are enough to tilt the surface towards a marvelous space.