Paolo Uccello

Paolo Uccello
Portrait of Paolo Uccello (unknown artist) Louvre Museum, Paris
Born	Paolo di Dono 1397 (1397) Pratovecchio, Italy
Died	10 December 1475 (aged 77–78) Florence, Italy
Nationality	Italian
Education	Lorenzo Ghiberti
Known for	Painting, Fresco
Notable work	Funerary Monument to Sir John Hawkwood, Saint George and the Dragon, The Battle of San Romano
Movement	Early Renaissance

Paolo Uccello (Italian pronunciation: [ˈpaːolo utˈtʃɛllo]; 1397 – 10 December 1475), born Paolo di Dono, was an Italian painter and mathematician who was notable for his pioneering work on visual perspective in art. In his book, Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari wrote that Uccello was obsessed by his interest in perspective and would stay up all night in his study trying to grasp the exact vanishing point. While his contemporaries used perspective to narrate different or succeeding stories, Uccello used perspective in order to create a feeling of depth in his paintings. His best known works are the three paintings representing the battle of San Romano, which were wrongly entitled the "Battle of Sant' Egidio of 1416" for a long period of time.

Paolo worked in the Late Gothic tradition, emphasizing colour and pageantry rather than the classical realism that other artists were pioneering. Thus, his style is best described as idiosyncratic. While he has had some influence on twentieth-century art and literary criticism (e.g., in the "Vies imaginaires" by Marcel Schwob, "Uccello le poil" by Antonin Artaud and "O Mundo Como Ideia" by Bruno Tolentino), he left no school of followers.

The sources for Paolo Uccello’s life are few: Giorgio Vasari’s biography, written 75 years after Paolo’s death, and a few contemporary official documents. Due to the lack of sources, even his date of birth is questionable. It is believed that Uccello was born in Pratovecchio in 1397. However, while his tax declarations for some years indicate that he was born in 1397, in 1446, he claimed to be born in 1396. His father, Dono di Paolo, was a barber-surgeon from Pratovecchio near Arezzo; his mother, Antonia, was a high-born Florentine. His nickname came from his fondness for painting birds.