Describe and Discuss the Battle of San Romano by Paolo Uccello

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but for Uccello’s paintings.

The Battle of San Romano took place in the valley of the Arno on 1 June 1432 when the Florentines decisively beat the combined forces of Lucca and her allies, Genoa, Milan and Siena, in a dispute over access to the port of Pisa. Uccello completed these panel paintings some years after the event, partly from his imagination and partly based on eye-witness descriptions.

The three panels, that Uccello painted, originally decorated the large hall on the ground of the Medici Palace but one is now in the Louvre in Paris, one is in the Uffizi gallery in Florence and one is in the National Gallery in London.

The paintings, each measuring more than 10 feet long, are painted in egg tempera on wooden panels. Sadly, their condition has deteriorated significantly over the years.

The focus of this painting is one point perspective. All lines converge towards the vanishing point on the Captains horses’ eye. Captain is the focal point and is depicted in parade armour and on a white horse.

The battle lasted eight hours, and the three images represent different hours of day, the London panel is set at dawn, the Florence panel is set at mid-day, while the Louvre panel is set at dusk. In all three pictures the battle scene is portrayed as an action-packed but chaotic clash of horsemen, lances and debris in a desperate melee and intersecting perspective planes.

The panels indicate both the artist’s and the patron’s fascination with warfare and weapons of war. Every feature is accounted for knights, foot soldier, shields, lances, crossbows, trumpets, flags and horses. Uccello was also obsessed with detail, this is very clear in the rivets in the armour, the nails on the horseshoes, on the harnesses of the horses and the pattern on Captain Tolentino’s headdress. A sense of space and place is created by the landscape and the figures fighting in the distance.