Paolo Uccello, one of the most eccentric painters of the early Renaissance, was obsessed with perspective.
According to Giorgio Vasari — the 16th-century painter and biographer who is our main source for Renaissance gossip — Uccello's wife complained that he stayed up all night working.
When she begged him to come to bed he would say: 'Oh, what a sweet thing this perspective is!' This painting is his laboratory.
It depicts the Florentine victory over the Sienese at the Battle of San Romano in 1432 — a real engagement fought some 30 miles outside Florence, lasting six or seven hours, between roughly 4,000 Florentine cavalry and their Sienese rivals.
Florence considered it a victory; Siena claimed the same.
But look at how Uccello has depicted it: the broken lances on the ground all converge to a single vanishing point, the horses are almost geometrical, the hedgerow behind the figures is flat decorative pattern.
The whole scene has something almost abstract about it — closer to a diagram of perspective theory than to a battlefield.
A painting that plays by rules of its own devising and doesn't apologise for it.
This is one panel from a triptych commissioned for a Medici bedroom.
The other two panels are in the National Gallery in London and the Louvre in Paris — separated during the 19th century when the Uffizi sold them.
Fun fact: the Uffizi has been trying to reunite all three panels for decades.
Both London and Paris have declined.
