The Italian city-states were constantly at war, but this battle is between surface decoration and deep space.
Paolo Uccello, Battle of San Romano, c. 1438–40 (National Gallery, London)
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Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:04] Niccolò da Tolentino, the Florentine commander, rises up on his charger. He wears no helmet. This is a painting about the Florentine victory over the Sienese that was part of a broader conflict with the city of Lucca.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:19] Of course, the Italian city-states were always at war with one another. This painting of the Battle of San Romano is actually one of three panels of this subject that were meant as a set. One of the others is in the Uffizi, and the other is in the Louvre in Paris.
Dr. Zucker: [0:35] They’re large paintings, so you really feel as if the battle is in front of you.
Dr. Harris: [0:39] Imagine the three together, and they were all together in the Medici Palace. These paintings were a favorite of Lorenzo de’ Medici, who actually had them forcibly removed from the home of the family that had commissioned them in Florence and brought to the Medici Palace, which you could do if you were Lorenzo de’ Medici, basically the ruler of Florence.
[1:00] It is a scene of a battle, but the painting, to me, it’s about two competing elements of painting in Florence in the first half of the 15th century.
Dr. Zucker: [1:10] Paolo Uccello, the artist, was very much a product of International Gothic, of this late strain of Gothic style that really emphasized pattern and the decorative. On the other hand, he also lived in Florence when Brunelleschi lived there and had developed linear perspective, this radically modern approach to representing space in painting.
[1:34] You have a painting that is about another kind of conflict, I think that’s exactly right, the conflict between the idea of surface decoration and the ability to render deep space.
Dr. Harris: [1:44] You have many, many decorative elements here that are in line with that International Gothic style, from the pattern on the commander’s fabulous turban, the gold decorations that we see on the bridles and the saddles of the horses, or even the decorative curving shapes of the armor.
[2:04] At the same time, we have a mathematical illusion of space created with linear perspective being applied in the oddest way, with the orthogonals created by the lances that have fallen to the ground.
Dr. Zucker: [2:18] On the one hand, all that decorative metalwork, for instance in the bridles, really pushes up against the surface of the painting and denies depth. On the other hand, you have exactly the opposite thing happening with all of the debris of the battle that’s fallen below the horses. Look at the way those fragments of lances, for instance, create almost a kind of chessboard.
Dr. Harris: [2:37] That conflicts also with the background, where we see vegetation that create[s] a flat tapestry-like pattern behind them. That also denies an illusion into space.
Dr. Zucker: [2:49] Look at the specific information that the artist has given us. Look at the bridle gear or even the straps at the back of the armor.
[2:56] One of my favorite areas is if you look in the background and you look at some of the smaller figures that play against that monochromatic field, you can see archers with crossbows who are reloading their weapons by pulling on them at their feet.
Dr. Harris: [3:11] These two tendencies that we see in Florentine painting, of the decorative and the scientific, come together in Uccello’s “Battle of San Romano.”
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