Paolo Uccello

Paolo Uccello (1397?-1475), Italian Renaissance painter, notable for innovations in the use of foreshortening and linear perspective. He was born Paolo di Dono in Florence and was apprenticed at an early age to Florentine artist Lorenzo Ghiberti. In 1425 he traveled to Venice to design mosaics for the facade of Saint Mark's Cathedral. After his return to Florence, he painted a fresco of English mercenary Sir John Hawkwood for the city's cathedral in 1436. About 1444 he executed a series of stained-glass windows for the cathedral, of which one, on the resurrection of Jesus Christ, is still in place. Fragments also remain of frescoes Uccello painted in the Chiostro Verde (Green Cloister) of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, depicting the biblical stories of the creation and the deluge; the latter frescoes were executed about 1447.

Few paintings by Uccello are extant. The most famous are three versions of the Battle of San Romano (Uffizi, Florence; Louvre, Paris; and National Gallery, London), made in about 1456. These works, along with The Hunt (1468, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, England) show Uccello's fascination with scientific perspective and his sense of decorative pattern.