Paolo Uccello ab ovo - Al Canto dei Carnesecchi

224 Pages·2008·2.49 MB·English

Hugh Hudson

Paolo Uccello
ab ovo

VOLUME ONE

Contents

Volume One
Acknowledgments____v
Abbreviations____vi
Introduction____1
1 A Life in the Archives____7
2 Origins of a Career: From Castello to Venice____31
3 The 1430s: ‘Buono Componitore e Vario’____57
4 Perspective: Form and Symbol____94
5 Santa Maria del Fiore ____115
6 The Battle Paintings____139
7 The Master and his Workshop ____154
8 The Art of Painting: Scienzia and Poesia____175
9 Hermetic Meditation: Final Works ____195
10 Epilogue ____206

Volume Two
Appendix A: Catalogue Raisonné
Appendix B: Documents
Bibliography

v
Acknowledgments

This work grew out of my PhD thesis Paolo Uccello: The Life and Work of an Italian
Renaissance Artist completed in 2006 at The University of Melbourne, where I thank
Professor Jaynie Anderson, Dr Christopher Marshall, Professor Nigel Morgan, Dr Ursula
Betka, Dr Andrew Turner, Dr Grantley McDonald, Sharon Harding, Jane Brown, Vanessa
Cloney, and Ian Kendrick, for all their help. Funding from the University included a
Melbourne Research Scholarship, a Palladio Trust Peggy Guggenheim Collection Internship
Grant, an Alma Hansen Scholarship, and RAGS, TRIPS, and MATS grants. Beyond the
University I am grateful to Professor Dale Kent, Professor William Kent, and Dr Nicholas
Eckstein for encouraging my interest in Florentine social history. At the National Gallery of
Victoria Dr Gerard Vaughan, Dr Ted Gott, John Payne, Carl Villis, Gary Sommerfeld, and
Janine Bofill generously assisted my study of the Melbourne Saint George.
In Italy I am grateful to Dr Fabrizio Lollini, Corrinna Giudici, Dr Ludovica
Sebregondi, Professor Giorgio Bonsanti, Dr Cecilia Frosinini, Francesca Fiorelli, Dr Lorenza
Melli, Dr Anna Padoa Rizzo, Dr Margaret Haines, Dr Alana O’Brien, Don Paolo Aglietti,
Don Gilberto Aranci, Signora Sabatini, Rolf Bagemihl, Pierluigi Carnesecchi, and the staff of
the Archivio di Stato di Firenze, the Museo di San Marco, and the Galleria degli Uffizi. In the
United Kingdom I wish to thank Dr Catherine Whistler, Geraldine Glynn, and Clare Farrah at
the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, for their kind help in studying the Annunciation, including
making new scientific analyses with the assistance of the National Gallery, London,
Conservation Department. At the Gallery I had invaluable discussions with Rachel Billinge
and Ashok Roy, and was aided in the archives by Isobel Siddons and Matti Watton.
Elsewhere in the U.K. Aidan Weston-Lewis, Dr Sergio Benedetti, Dr Alexandra Villing, Ann
Massing, Lynda McLeod, and Jane E.H. Hamilton responded helpfully to my enquiries. In
France I thank Harriet O’Malley, Bruno Monnier, Jean-Pierre Mohen, Dr Genevieve Aitken,
and Monsieur Saint Fare Garnot; in Germany, Dr Dietmar Lüdke and the Conservation
Department at the Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe; in Spain, Dolores Delgado; in Belgium,
Professors Hélène Verougstraete and Roger van Schoute; in the United States, Professor John
Paoletti, Professor Megan Holmes, Dr Keith Christiansen, and Ronda Kasl.
Finally, thanks to my parenti, amici, e vicini: Nicole McKay, Gina Roberts, Nikki
and Sasha Milojovic, Melanie Miller and Sébastian Aubert, Elena Zoppi and Filippo Vecelli,
Camilla Seibezzi, Ingrid Fournival, Johanne Lallemande, Anna Arkin-Gallagher, Lucas
O’Brien and Sastra, Elisabeth Pilgrim, Lauren Klesch, Lisa Mansfield, Tim Ould, Dominik
Tscütcher, Katrina Grant, Ryan Johnston, and Astrid Krautschneider.
vi
Abbreviations

AODF Archivio dell’Opera del Duomo di Firenze
ASF Archivio di Stato di Firenze
ASMC Archivio di San Michele a Castello
BPRO British Public Records Office
CRRMF Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France
CRSGF Corporazioni Religiose Soppresse dal Governo Francese
CRSPL Corporazioni Religiose Soppresse da Pietro Leopoldo
IRR Infrared Reflectography
KIF Kunsthistorisches Institut Florenz
MPAP Magistrato dei Pupilli Avanti il Principato
NGL National Gallery, London
NGV National Gallery of Victoria
OPD Opificio delle Pietre Dure
VT Villa I Tatti

In the fifteenth century the Florentine calendar began on 25 March, the Feast of the
Annunciation and the reputed date of the founding of the city. To avoid confusion dates are
given in the modern calendar except when quoted.

Translations are by the author unless specified in the endnotes. Errors or anomalous spellings
are not modified in transcriptions of documents.
Introduction

Around 1484 there occurred in Florence a remarkable episode in the early history of the
collecting of Renaissance paintings. Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449–1492), one of the city’s most
powerful citizens, sent a group of his acolytes to take by force Uccello’s three Battle paintings
from the residence of Damiano Bartolini, whence they were delivered to the Palazzo Medici
on Via Larga in the north of the city.1 Probably at this time, the arch shaped tops of the panels
were sawn off and the gaps in the top corners, which would have accommodated corbels
where they had previously been installed, were filled to suit their new surroundings.2 These
events are testimony to the acquisitive zeal that Uccello’s works have occasionally inspired
and an instance of the physical transformations that many of his works have undergone.
Uccello was famous in his lifetime and his works have been coveted since, even if they were
not always well looked after. There has probably been no more important collector of
Uccello’s paintings than Lorenzo, who had five installed in a room on the ground floor of the
Palazzo Medici (‘chamera grande terrena detta la chamera di Lorenzo’).3
When in 1550 Giorgio Vasari published Le vite de’ piú eccellenti architetti, pittori, et
scultori italiani (The Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Architects, Painters and Sculptors)
with a dedication to Lorenzo’s great-grandson and heir to his collection, Cosimo de’ Medici
(1519–1574), he devoted a chapter to Uccello, and named him with Brunelleschi, Donatello,
Ghiberti, and Masaccio as one of the remarkable generation that revived the art of Florence in
the Renaissance. In so doing, Vasari flattered Medici taste and guaranteed Uccello’s
reputation for posterity.4 Vasari lauded the most conspicuous highlights of Uccello’s career,
such as the Equestrian Monument for Sir John Hawkwood in the Duomo and the Flood and
Recession of the Flood in the Chiostro Verde of Santa Maria Novella. While referring to the
fact that Uccello painted many small works to be found in houses across Florence, he scarcely
mentioned the subjects of these works and it was only centuries later with the emergence of
connoisseur art historians in the second half of the nineteenth century, such as James Arthur
Crowe, Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle, Bernard Berenson, and Charles Loeser, that the task
of reconstructing the entirety of Uccello’s oeuvre was begun.
The first scholarly book on Uccello, Wilhelm Boeck’s Paolo Uccello: Der
Florentiner Meister und Sein Werk of 1939 (Berlin), appeared late in comparison with those
2 INTRODUCTION
for the leading artists of the early Renaissance. It was not until John Pope-Hennessy’s
monograph of 1950 that an account of Uccello’s career became a classic. However, changing
scholarly opinion left the distinguished English critic’s views increasingly isolated. Even in
its second edition of 1969, his monograph did not adapt to the growing consensus concerning
the attribution of works to Uccello, rejecting nine paintings now commonly accepted as
Uccello’s and ignoring others, such as the Oxford Annunciation and the Melbourne Saint
George. Unknown works continued to emerge over the second half of the twentieth century,
such as the lyrical Del Beccuto Virgin and Child identified by Alessandro Parronchi in 1969
in storage at the Museo di San Marco in Florence. In 1980 Carlo Volpe recognised Uccello’s
authorship of the enchanting Adoration of the Child, discovered in 1977 under a layer of
whitewash in the sacristy of the church of San Martino Maggiore in Bologna, in a
perspicacious article on Uccello’s early career that appeared in the Italian journal Paragone.
He also introduced the luminous Profile Portrait of a Young Man into the mainstream
literature in the same article. It had gone virtually unnoticed by scholars in a private collection
in Paris until the early twentieth century, before passing through the hands of various dealers
and then entering another private collection in the United States around 1941. It is now
housed in the Museum of Art in Indianapolis.5 These and other works newly attributed to
Uccello over the course of the twentieth century provide the impetus for this re-assessment of
his oeuvre ab ovo.
Vasari’s biography of Uccello is invaluable for its information about the locations of
some of Uccello’s major works in the mid-sixteenth century, but has proved to be unreliable
for the details of his life, as shown by the discovery of archival evidence that contradicts
Vasari since the seventeenth century.6 New factual evidence continues to be found in
Florentine archives. Two recent discoveries concern Uccello’s membership of, and patronage
by, Florentine confraternities.7 While it is still the case that only four works by Uccello
appearing in contemporary documents can be identified unequivocally with surviving works,
all of them in the Duomo in Florence, the steady accumulation of historical data in Florentine
Renaissance studies allows an increasingly rich and integrated study of the artist and the
society in which he lived and worked. In particular, the importance of families and
neighbours in the Florentine Renaissance has rightly been emphasised by social historians
such as Dale Kent and William Kent,8 and for art history too, the family and neighbourhood
are important and under-researched influences on artists’ lives,9 although Anna Padoa Rizzo
has conducted important research into the links between Uccello’s family and his early
patrons.10 Chapter 1 provides a biography of the artist based on archival evidence, including a
seventeenth-century document for the tombstone of Uccello and his father, which confirms
that their family was armigerous, and an eighteenth-century genealogy of the most prominent
INTRODUCTION 3
branch of Uccello’s mother’s family, providing evidence for his relationship to two presumed
patrons.11
Chapter 2 examines Uccello’s early career beyond Ghiberti’s workshop, up to and
including his stay in Venice, beginning in 1425. This period remains rather mysterious,
notwithstanding the recent attributions of two paintings to the young Uccello, by Boskovits
(1992) and Parronchi (1998). However, a series of fifteenth-century documents help shed
light on the social context of Uccello’s early activity in which he came into contact with
networks of patronage from wealthy families and the ecclesiastical institutions they supported
in Castello, to the northwest of Florence, and in the Santa Maria Novella quarter of Florence
where he lived. Some new, specific observations concerning mosaics and pavimenti at San
Marco in Venice support their attribution to Uccello, discussed by earlier commentators only
in general terms. Chapter 3 examines the mural and panel paintings Uccello completed in the
1430s following his return to Florence from Venice, including little-studied works such as the
Oxford Annunciation and Melbourne Saint George.
Uccello’s name is synonymous with perspective and art historians have dedicated
considerable efforts to establishing the formal characteristics of his use of perspective through
visual analysis of works. The theoretical basis of Uccello’s perspective has also been
investigated through comparisons of his works with written sources.12 However, there has
been little analysis of the evidence provided by the contexts of Uccello’s works for the
interpretation of his use of perspective. Chapter 4 examines three of Uccello’s most
celebrated demonstrations of perspective from the point of view of their original or early
contexts: the Battle paintings from the Bartolini residence in Via Porta Rossa, now in the
National Gallery, London, the Musée du Louvre, Paris, and the Galleria degli Uffizi,
Florence; the Nativity from the Spedale di San Martino alla Scala, now in the reserve
collection of the Uffizi; and the Flood and Recession of the Flood in the Chiostro Verde of
Santa Maria Novella. It is proposed that there are quite varied and specific intentions in
Uccello’s uses of perspective in these works.
The political dimension of Uccello’s work does not often receive the attention it
deserves. Chapter 5 looks at his commissions in the Duomo in Florence, where his patrons in
the Wool Merchants’ Guild (Arte della Lana) included some of the wealthiest and most
powerful and educated members of the Florentine Republic. Together, they articulated in
images, political and religious subjects of great symbolic importance to the city. It is argued
here that the iconography of the Equestrian Monument for Sir John Hawkwood reflects in part
the political turmoil in the Florentine government caused by the recent failed war with Lucca.
The following chapter is devoted to the Battle paintings, probably commissioned a few years
later by a private patron, explicitly glorifying episodes from that war, and making politically
4 INTRODUCTION
charged allusions to its conduct and its ramifications for the struggle for power between the
conservative, oligarchic elite of the Albizzi family and its allies and the Medici family and its
supporters.13
While there has long been speculation about the nature of Uccello’s workshop,
conservation science offers new means of addressing the problem. The development of
infrared reflectography in the 1970s, as an improvement on the earlier method of infrared
photography, provided a more powerful means of detecting underdrawing and pentimenti
(changes made to a composition during its execution) under the surfaces of paintings and
drawings).14 Conservation campaigns have also transformed the appearance of works such as
the Virgin and Child in the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, cleaned by the Istituto
Centrale del Restauro di Roma in 1968, revealing even to the previously sceptical Pope-
Hennessy that it is by Uccello.15 Armed with such evidence the art historian is in a better
position to determine how the physical make-up of artworks reveals their authorship, their
artists’ creative processes, when they were made, and sometimes even their meaning. Chapter
7 discusses the division of labour between Uccello and his workshop in the late 1440s and
1450s, proposing on the basis of conservation and stylistic evidence that Uccello had one or
more assistants responsible for painting a series of small devotional works from his designs.
In Chapter 8 the creation of Uccello’s paintings is described on the basis of the study
of their materials and technique. New scientific analyses of three works were undertaken for
this (for the Oxford Annunciation, the Melbourne Saint George, and the Karlsruhe
Adoration). Unpublished technical examinations of Uccello’s works were also consulted in
the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France in Paris, the Staatliche
Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe, and the National Gallery, London. This is the first attempt to survey
Uccello’s materials and technique, and it illustrates the diversity of his methods over his long
career.16 The small group of Uccello’s late works is discussed in the following chapter, which
may be characterised as exhibiting an appearance of charming innocence on the surface,
belied by more serious—some might say extreme—themes of monastic self-denial and
religious zeal.
The epilogue examines Uccello’s critical reception, focussing on how art historians
and connoisseurs have dealt with the problem of defining his oeuvre. A conservative estimate
of the number of surviving works by Uccello in all media numbers under forty. However,
over a hundred more works have been ascribed to him, largely a product of speculative
attributions made before the more systematic connoisseurship of the late nineteenth century,
but also a reflection of the changing conception of Uccello’s style.
The considerable scope of Uccello’s oeuvre defies easy categorisation along the lines
of theoretical polarities such as Gothic and Renaissance style, chivalry and humanism,