The Battle of San Romano

The Battle of San Romano
Niccolò Mauruzi da Tolentino at the Battle of San Romano
Artist	Paolo Uccello
Year	c. 1435–1460
Type	egg tempera with walnut oil and linseed oil on poplar
Location	National Gallery, Galleria degli Uffizi, Musée du Louvre

The Battle of San Romano is a set of three paintings by the Florentine painter Paolo Uccello depicting events that took place at the Battle of San Romano between Florentine and Sienese forces in 1432. They are significant as revealing the development of linear perspective in early Italian Renaissance painting, and are unusual as a major secular commission. The paintings are in egg tempera on wooden panels, each over 3 metres long. According to the National Gallery,^[1] the panels were commissioned by a member of the Bartolini Salimbeni family in Florence sometime between 1435 and 1460. The paintings were much admired in the 15th century; Lorenzo de' Medici so coveted them that he purchased one and had the remaining two forcibly removed to the Palazzo Medici. They are now divided between three collections, the National Gallery, London, the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, and the Musée du Louvre, Paris.

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(piano playing) Dr. Steven Zucker: Niccolo da Tolentino the Florentine commander rises up on his charger. He wears no helmet. This is a painting about the Florentine victory over the Sienese that was part of a broader conflict with the city of Lucca. Dr. Beth Harris: And, of course, the Italian city states were always at war with one another and this painting of the Battle of San Romano is actually one of three panels of this subject that were meant as a set. One of the others is in Uffizi and the other is in the Louvre in Paris. Dr. Zucker: And they're large paintings, so you really feel as if the battle is in front of you. Dr. Harris: So, imagine the three together and they were all together in the Medici Palace. These paintings were a favorite of Lorenzo de'Medici who actually had them forceably removed from the home of the family that had commissioned them in Florence and brought to the Medici Palace, which you could do if you were Lorenzo de'Medici, basically the ruler of Florence. It is the scene of a battle, but the painting to me, it's about two competing elements of painting in Florence in the first half of the 15th Century. Dr. Zucker: Paolo Uccello, the artist, was very much a product of international Gothic of this late strain of Gothic style that really emphasized pattern and the decorative. On the other hand, he also lived in Florence when Berlesci lived there and had developed the near perspective. This radically modern approach to representing space in painting and so you have a painting that is about another kind of conflict. I think that is exactly right, the conflict between the idea of surface decoration and the ability to render deep space. Dr. Harris: So, you have many, many decorative elements here that are in line with that international Gothic style from the pattern on the commanders fabulous turban, the gold decorations that we see on the bridles and the saddles of the horses or even those decorative curving shapes of the armor. At the same time, we have a mathematical illusion of space created with linear perspective being applied in the oddest way with the orthogonals created by the lances that have fallen to the ground. Dr. Zucker: So, on the one hand, all that decorative metal work, for instance, in the bridles really pushes up against the surface of the painting and denies depth. On the other hand, you have exactly the opposite thing happening with all of the debris of the battle that's fallen below the horses. Look at the way those fragments of lances, for instance, create almost a kind of chess board. Dr. Harris: And that conflicts also with the background where we see vegetation. That create a flat tapestry like pattern behind them that also denies an illusion into space. Dr. Zucker: Look at the specific information that the artist has given us. Look at the bridle gear or even the straps at the back of the armor. One of my favorite areas, is if you look in the background and you look at some of the smaller figures that play against that monochromatic field, you can see archers with crossbows who are reloading their weapons by pulling on them at their feet. Dr. Harris: So, these two tendencies that we see in Florentine painting of the decorative and the scientific, come together in Uccello's Battle of San Romano. (piano playing)

Subject

The three paintings are:

Niccolò Mauruzi da Tolentino at the Battle of San Romano (probably c. 1438–1440), egg tempera with walnut oil and linseed oil on poplar, 182 × 320 cm, National Gallery, London.^[2]
Niccolò Mauruzi da Tolentino unseats Bernardino della Carda^[3] at the Battle of San Romano (dating uncertain, c. 1435–1455), tempera on wood, 182 × 320 cm, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
The Counterattack of Michelotto da Cotignola at the Battle of San Romano (c. 1455), wood panel, 182 × 317 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris

The Uffizi panel was probably designed to be the central painting of the triptych and is the only one signed by the artist. The sequence most widely agreed among art historians is: London, Uffizi, Louvre, although others have been proposed. They may represent different times of day: dawn (London), mid-day (Florence) and dusk (Paris) – the battle lasted eight hours.

In the London painting, Niccolò da Tolentino, with his large gold and red patterned hat, is seen leading the Florentine cavalry. He had a reputation for recklessness, and doesn't even wear a helmet, though he sent two messengers (the departure of the two messengers, depicted centre, top) to tell his allied army of Attendolo to hurry to his aid as he is facing a superior force.^[4] In the foreground, broken lances and a dead soldier are carefully aligned into orthogonals, so as to create an impression of perspective. Similar to that of a tapestry, the landscape rises up in a picture plane as opposed to receding deeply into space. This illusion of a backdrop and a perspective theme resembling a stage, depicts the war as a theatrical ceremony.^[5] The three paintings were designed to be hung high on three different walls of a room, and the perspective designed with that height in mind, which accounts for many apparent anomalies in the perspective when seen in photos or at normal gallery height.

Many areas of the paintings were covered with gold and silver leaf. While the gold leaf, such as that found on the decorations of the bridles, has remained bright, the silver leaf, found particularly on the armour of the soldiers, has oxidized to a dull grey or black. The original impression of the burnished silver would have been dazzling. All of the paintings, especially that in the Louvre, have suffered from time and early restoration, and many areas have lost their modelling.^[2]

The panels were a subject in the BBC series The Private Life of a Masterpiece (2005).

References in popular culture

The dark horse in the Louvre panel, mounted by Micheletto Attendolo (da Cotignola), can be seen painted in a tapestry, in the first segment ("Metzengerstein") of the 1968 omnibus film Spirits of the Dead. In the 4th Episode (Lucrezia's Wedding) of the 2011 TV Series The Borgias, the London and Louvre panel is shown adorning the dining hall walls of the Florentine Prince when cardinal Della Rovere visits him in Florence.

External media
Audio
Personal response: Serena Ferrente^[6]
Video
Smarthistory – Uccello's The Battle of San Romano^[7]

References

^ Paolo Uccello The Battle of San Romano NG583
^ ^a ^b National Gallery Catalogues: The Fifteenth Century Italian Paintings, Volume 1, by Dillian Gordon, 2003, pp. 378–397 ISBN 1-85709-293-7
^ «and not Ciarda, as he is often referred to" (Lorenzo Sbaraglio, Paolo di Dono, detto Paolo Uccello, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani - Volume 81 - 2014).
^ Private Life of a Masterpiece, BBC TV
^ Davis, Denny, Hofrichter, Jacobs, Roberts, Simon (2011). Janson's History of Art" The Western Tradition Eighth Edition. London: Laurence King Publishing LTD. p. 538. ISBN 9780205685172.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
^ "Personal response: Serena Ferrente". National Gallery. Archived from the original on April 19, 2015. Retrieved December 31, 2012.
^ "Uccello's The Battle of San Romano". Smarthistory at Khan Academy. Retrieved December 31, 2012.