Paolo Uccello - painter

Pioneer of perspective also worked in mosaics

The first panel of Uccello's fresco series, Battle of
San Romano, on display at the National Gallery

Paolo Uccello, who was one of the leading painters in Florence in the 15th century, died on this day in 1475 at the age of 78.

The son of a surgeon, Uccello served an apprenticeship in the workshop of the sculptor and goldsmith Lorenzo Ghiberti but made his own mark as a painter and also as a mosaicist, at one time employed to work on the facade of Basilica di San Marco in Venice.

Younger than Ghiberti, Filippo Brunelleschi and Donatello, three giants of the Early Renaissance period, Uccello belonged to a generation of artists eager to move away from the flat, decorative forms of traditional Gothic art. His work is more often characterised by clear colours, well-defined outlines and a dramatic narrative, although he retains the fairytale quality of Gothic.

He was noted for his interest in linear perspective, which helped create a sense of depth in many of his paintings. According to Giorgio Vasari, the 16th century painter and architect whose book, Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, led him to become known as the first art historian, Uccello was so fixated with perspective that he would stay up all night, seeking to apply his knowledge of mathematics to ensuring the angles in his pictures and the relative scale were exactly right.

Uccello's St George and the Dragon echoed the
typical themes of traditional Gothic art

Uccello’s most celebrated works include a 1456 cycle of paintings depicting the Battle of San Romano, in which a Florentine army defeated Sienese troops in 1432, originally commissioned to adorn the palace of a Florentine politician, Lionardo Bartolini Salimbeni.  The three panels that comprised the cycle are now shared between the National Gallery in London, the Louvre in Paris and the Uffizi in Florence.

His love of perspective, meanwhile, was no better illustrated than in The Flood and The Waters Receding, part of a 1447-48 fresco depicting Scenes from the Life of Noah, which he painted for the Chiostro Verde of the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella in Florence.

His St George and the Dragon (c1456), which is also kept by the National Gallery in London), and the Miracle of the Desecrated Host (c1467), housed in Urbino’s Galleria Nazionale, are other notable works.

Uccello was born Paolo di Dono or Paolo Doni. His father was from a wealthy Florentine family and his mother from the noble Del Beccuto family, who had three chapels in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, one of which Uccello would decorate himself. It is not known with certainty why he came to be known as Paolo Uccello, although he often used birds - uccelli - as well as small animals in his paintings as a device to help create perspective.

At the age of 10, Uccello became an apprentice in the workshop of Ghiberti. It was around the time that Ghiberti was creating the renowned bronze doors for the Florence cathedral's Baptistery, known as The Gates of Paradise.  

Uccello's fascination with perspective is evident
in this section of his Scenes from the life of Noah

Little remains of his work for Ghiberti. The earliest frescoes attributed to him, though now badly damaged, are in the Chiostro Verde of Santa Maria Novella and depict episodes from the Creation. 

From 1425 to 1431, Uccello worked as a master mosaicist in Venice. Documentary evidence has come to light suggesting that a mosaic of Saint Peter for the facade of the Basilica di San Marco, which was depicted in Gentile Bellini's 1496 painting, Processione in Piazza San Marco, was Uccello’s. Sadly, if there was such a piece, it no longer exists.  Some floor mosaics within the basilica are more confidently attributed to Uccello.

After returning to Florence, where he was to stay for most of the rest of his life, he executed works for various churches and patrons, most notably the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore, the city’s Duomo.

This mosaic on the floor of Basilica San
Marco in Venice is attributed to Uccello

In 1436, Uccello completed a monochrome fresco of an equestrian monument to Sir John Hawkwood in the Duomo. This work exemplified his keen interest in perspective. The condottiero and his horse are presented as if the fresco was a sculpture seen from below. At the same time, a sense of controlled potential energy within the horse and rider were characteristic of the new style of the Renaissance that had blossomed during Uccello’s lifetime.

Later, he painted the four heads of the prophets that surround the clock on the Duomo’s interior west facade clock, and designed a number of stained glass windows.

The three paintings celebrating the Battle of San Romano are thought to have been executed between 1438 and 1440. The three panels were exhibited until 1784 in a room in the Medici Palace on Via Larga in Florence.

Married in 1453 to Tommasa Malifici, Uccello had a son, Donato, with whom he worked towards the end of his life, and a daughter, Antonia, who became a Carmelite nun. 

In poor health, Uccello stopped working in 1470. His last will and testament was dated November 11, 1475, about a month before he died. He was buried in his father's tomb in the church of Santo Spirito in Florence.

The magnificent Florence Duomo, topped by
Brunelleschi's colossal dome, towers over the city

Travel tip:

Florence’s Duomo - the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore - with its enormous dome by Filippo Brunelleschi and campanile by Giotto, is one of Italy's most recognisable and most photographed sights, the dominant feature of the city’s skyline. From groundbreaking to consecration, the project spanned 140 years and involved a series of architects. Arnolfo di Cambio, who also designed the Basilica of Santa Croce and the Palazzo Vecchio, was the original architect engaged and it was largely to his template that the others worked.  When he died in 1410, 14 years after the first stone was laid, he was succeeded by Giotto, who himself died in 1337, after which his assistant Andrea Pisano took up the project.  Pisano died in 1348, as the Black Death swept Europe, and a succession of architects followed, culminating in Brunelleschi, who won a competition - against Lorenzo Ghiberti - to build the dome, which remains the largest brick-built dome ever constructed.

The facade of the Basilica of Santa Maria
Novella, designed by Leon Battista Alberti

Travel tip:

The Gothic Basilica of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, for which Uccello created his Scenes from the Life of Noah fresco series, which included The Flood and The Waters Receding, was built in the 13th century by the Dominicans and can be described as the city’s first great basilica. This church was given the suffix ‘Novella’ - new - because it was built on the site of the 9th-century oratory of Santa Maria delle Vigne.  The new church was commissioned by wealthy Florentine wool merchant Giovanni di Paolo Rucellai and designed principally by Leon Battista Alberti. The church, recognisable for its white marble façade, was built between 1456 and 1470. A list of its notable artworks reads like a roll call of masters of Gothic and early Renaissance painting and sculpture, including Botticelli, Bronzino, Brunelleschi, Duccio, Ghiberti, Ghirlandaio, Lippi, Masaccio, Pisano, Uccello and Vasari. The city’s nearby main railway station takes its name from the basilica.

Also on this day:

1813: The birth of composer Errico Petrella

1903: The birth of painter Giuseppe Dossena

1907: The birth of actor Amedeo Nazzari

1921: The birth of football administrator Giuseppe 'Peppino' Prisco

1936: The death of playwright and novelist Luigi Pirandello

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Gino Severini - painter and mosaicist

Tuscan was leading figure in Futurist movement

Gino Severini, typically sporting a monacle, was
an influential figure in 20th century Italian art 

The painter and mosaicist Gino Severini, who was an important figure in the Italian Futurist movement in the early 20th century and is regarded as  one of the most progressive of all 20th century Italian artists, was born on this day in 1883 in the hilltop town of Cortona in Tuscany.

He divided his time largely between Rome and Paris, where he died in 1966. Although he was a signatory - along with Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo and Giacomo Balla - of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurist Painters in 1910, his work was not altogether typical of the movement.  

Indeed, ultimately he rejected Futurism, moving on to Cubism, having become friends with Cubist painters Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in Paris, before ultimately turning his interest to Neo-Classicism and the Return to Order movement that followed the First World War. 

He attracted criticism among his peers by his associations with the Fascist-supporting Novecento Italiano movement, whose work became closely linked with state propaganda. Severini was involved with Benito Mussolini's "Third Rome" project, supplying murals and mosaics for Fascist architectural structures inspired by imperial Rome. 

Working in mosaics became an increasing focus for Severini in his later years, particularly after he rediscovered his Catholic faith. His religious mosaics displayed such refined technique he was dubbed the “father of modern mosaics". 

Severini was also the author of many essays and several books on painting, including Du cubism au classicisme (From Cubism to Classicism) in 1921 and The Life of a Painter, a vivid account of his early career. 

Severini's Le Boulevard (1913), his Futurist 
interpretation of Parisian street life

Born into a family of modest means in Cortona, where his father a junior court official and his mother a dressmaker, Severini studied at the Scuola Tecnica in Cortona until the age of 15, at which point his formal education ceased when he and other classmates were caught trying to steal exam papers. They were expelled and probably lucky to escape prison. 

In 1899, his mother took him to Rome, thinking his prospects would be better there. He gained employment as a shipping clerk. He painted in his spare time and, thanks to the patronage of a fellow Cortonese with whom he had become friends, was able to attend art classes at the Rome Fine Arts Institute, studying nudes. He was not a disciplined student, however, and found himself cut adrift when his frustrated patron cancelled his allowance. 

Left to fend for himself when his mother returned to Cortona, Severini was so poor he lived in a room that was essentially a store cupboard in a kitchen in Via Sardegna in Ostiense. In 1900 he met Umberto Boccioni and Giacomo Balla for the first time. Balla took him on as a student, introducing him to the technique of pointillism, a painting method where effects were created by dotting the canvas or other surface with contrasting colours according to the principles of optical science.  The technique would have a major influence on Severini's early work and on Futurist painting in general.

Severini (right) with Luigi Russolo, Carlo Carrà, Filippo
Tommaso Marinetti and Umberto Boccioni in Paris in 1912

He moved to Paris in 1906 with Balla’s encouragement. Declaring the French capital to be his spiritual home, he settled in Montmartre, befriending another Italian, Amedeo Modigliani, and getting to know most of the city’s upcoming artists, including the Cubists Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Juan Gris and Picasso.

It was through Severini that some of the leading Italian Futurists visited Paris in 1911, absorbing some of Severini’s influence by adopting some of the humanist features of Cubism, namely the human figure in motion, as further means of expressing pictorial dynamism.  

Severini’s own Futurist work had been based on human figures, nightclub dancers or simply people in the street, rather than the cars or machines that had been central to the attempts of many of his fellow Futurist artists to depict speed and dynamism in painting.  In his nightclub scenes, he would evoke the sensations of movement and sound through rhythmic forms and flickering colours. His Dynamic Hieroglyph of the Bal Tabarin (1912) and The Boulevard (1913) were examples of his best work in Paris. 

However, Severini did produce some of the finest Futurist war art, notably his Red Cross Train Passing a Village (1914), Italian Lancers at a Gallop (1915) and Armoured Train (1915). 

His work over the next few years could be categorised as an idiosyncratic form of Cubism with elements of pointillism and Futurism before he began to experiment with a Neoclassical figurative style in portraits such as Maternity (1916). 

Severini's Mosaic of San Marco
in his hometown of Cortona

Severini had married in 1913, his bride Jeanne Paul Fort, the 16-year-old daughter of the French poet Paul Fort. The couple were desperately poor and when Severini succumbed to pleurisy soon after the wedding, they moved to live with his parents, by then living in Montepulciano, where Jeanne became pregnant. They moved back to Paris, where their daughter, Gina, was born. A second child, Tonio, died from pneumonia, which was a factor in reigniting Severini’s Catholicism, which he had earlier renounced.

Only between the wars did Severini begin to find financial stability, realised mainly through his commissions to create frescoes and mosaics. 

He produced mosaics for the Palazzo di Giustizia in Milan (1936), the Palazzo delle Poste in Alessandria (1936) and mosaics and frescoes at the University of Padua (1937).  He worked for the Mussolini regime at the Foro Italico, a multi-venue sports complex, and the Palazzo degli Uffici, the inaugural building of the EUR project. Severini’s association with the Fascists was roundly condemned within the international artistic community, although none of Severini’s work was overtly pro-Fascist. 

After the fall of Mussolini and the end of the Second World War, Severini received lucrative commissions to decorate the offices of the Italian airline companies KLM and Alitalia among other organisations. 

His Cubist-inspired Mosaic of San Marco (1961), which adorns the facade of the Church of San Marco in Cortona, is seen as a signature work. He died in Paris in 1966 at the age of 82 but was buried in Cortona.

Cortona's elevated position gives it commanding
views over the surrounding countryside

Travel tip:

Cortona, founded by the Etruscans, is one of the oldest cities in Tuscany. Its Etruscan Academy Museum displays a vast collection of bronze, ceramic and funerary items reflecting the town’s past. The museum also includes an archaeological park that includes city fortifications and stretches of Roman roads. Outside the museum, the houses in Via Janelli are some of the oldest houses still surviving in Italy. Powerful during the mediaeval period, Cortona was defeated by Naples in 1409 and then sold to Florence.  Characterised by its steep narrow streets, Cortona’s hilltop location - it has an elevation of 600 metres (2,000 ft) - offers sweeping views of the Valdichiana, including Lago Trasimeno, where Hannibal ambushed the Roman army in 217 BC during the Second Punic War.

The Piramide Cestia and Porta San Paolo are
two highlights of the Ostiense neighbourhood

Travel tip:

Severini’s earliest home in Rome was in the Ostiense neighbourhood, which can be found to the south of the Trastevere district. Bordered by the working class areas of Garbatella and Testaccio, Ostiense itself has shed its own down-at-heel reputation to become an increasingly trendy part of the city, populated by young professionals and boasting a thriving nightlife. The home of the majestic Basilica San Paolo Fuori le Mura - the Basilica of St Paul Outside the Walls - with its gold-plated ceilings, of the Roman  Piramide Cestia and the 3rd century Porta San Paolo, the district was built around the Via Ostiense, the ancient road linking the city with the Roman harbour at Ostia. 

Also on this day:

1763: The birth of musician Domenico Dragonetti

1794: The birth of opera singer Giovanni Battista Rubini

1906: Vesuvius erupts, killing more than 200 people

1973: The birth of footballer Marco Delvecchio

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