Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Paolo Uccello
Italian; 15th-century
London, England: The National Gallery
94%
The Battle of San Romano. c1440. Egg tempera with some oil on wood
Everything here — absolutely everything — appears to be pure surface, perfectly flat, yet perspective is lurking between each horse hoof and halberd, behind every lance. Somehow, this doesn't amount to so much decoration, but to a picture in all the modern senses: a virtual visual thing that rubs against its awkward self-knowledge of that virtuality. And yet the rubbing this picture does isn't strained, it's not combative. It communicates a comfort with its own limitations — the limitations of images as such — that can be disquieting to us today. That comfort is in the way the horses have been so blockishly modeled, in the paste-on garishness of ornaments like the commander's turban, in the ethereality of the pink-white foreground, in the rushed perspective of the fallen soldier. What we see in this painting is a medieval sensibility colliding, real-time, with the first possibilities of a modern mind. And yet Uccello seemed sanguine, collected. (TFS, 2025)