These Florentine realists may be divided into two generations. The first asserts itself before the middle of the fifteenth century, and is trained chiefly under the influence of such sculptors as Donatello, Brunellesco and Ghiberti. These painters work at the problem of light and shade, anatomy, and perspective, accepting in their art the guidance of sculpture. The second generation of realists come to their own after the middle of the century, are mostly trained as silversmiths, and work at the new technic of oil painting, at landscape and at the figure in action. Both groups relatively neglected the important matter of composition. Most of the realists sacrificed pictorial effect the better to master detail, but they also accumulated that vast body of knowledge upon which rests the glory of the High Renaissance, and nobody can understand the progress of Florentine painting without following sympathetically their great effort.
Fig. 93. Paolo Uccello. Battle of Cavalry.—Louvre.
Of the first generation, the quaintest figure is Paolo Uccello. Born in 1397, he soon gave himself fanatically to the study of the new science of perspective, especially to feats of foreshortening. His pictures are so many experiments and have a petrified inertness. Yet at his best he commands dignity and a considerable decorative power. About the year 1435 he painted for the Medici palace several battle scenes, three of which are respectively in the Louvre, Figure [93], National Gallery and Uffizi. The last, representing the Florentine victory of San Romano, shows the style. The forms are squared, in a fashion anticipating modern Cubism, in order to simplify the problem of placing and foreshortening. Corpses and lances are deliberately pointed at the spectator to offer so many problems in perspective. The landscape is minute and topographical. The decorative coloring is bold and original with interesting dissonances of oranges, russets, and greens. It is quite splendid after the unreal fashion of a tapestry.
Paolo’s masterpiece is the equestrian portrait of Sir John Hawkwood, Figure [94], the English soldier of fortune and occasional captain of the Florentine army, which is in the Cathedral. It is painted in gray-green touched with color, and simulates a tomb. The date is 1437. Since Roman times no equestrian monument of equal dignity had been created, and one is inclined to suspect that Uccello profited by preliminary studies of Donatello, his close friend, which later developed into the superb Gattamelata statue at Padua. Uccello has a lighter vein illustrated by furniture panels at Oxford, (a Hunt), at Paris, and Vienna, (St. George and the Dragon), but his most ambitious work is the decoration of the lunettes in the great cloister of Santa Maria Novella. The stories are drawn from the Old Testament, were started by Paolo, about the year 1446, and continued by several assistants. The medium was gray-green, terra verde, and the place accordingly is called the Green Cloister. Uccello’s manner may be best sensed in the fresco of the Deluge, in which the endeavor to set problems in perspective clashes unhappily with the desire to present a scene of terror. The figures are felt one at a time, there is little relation between them, and the picture has small merit apart from its probity in the rendering of details and a sort of abstract earnestness.
Uccello lived on till 1475, an indulged eccentric, ignored by the public and ridiculed by his greater friends. His zeal for perspective was unabated with age, and many a night his much-tried wife lost sleep as he murmured in the small hours—“O! thou dear perspective!”
Fig. 94. Paolo Uccello. Tomb Portrait of Sir John Hawkwood.—Cathedral.
Fig. 96. Andrea del Castagno. Portrait of a young man.—J. P. Morgan Coll., N. Y.