The Battle of San Romano

The Battle of San Romano, three tempera paintings on panel created between about 1435 and 1455 by Florentine artist Paolo Uccello, one of the great early masters of Renaissance perspective. This series of paintings are the artist’s best-known work and exhibit both Gothic and Renaissance elements.

Uccello trained in the workshop of the master sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti. In 1415 Uccello was admitted to the Arte dei Medici e degli Speziali, the guild of painters in Florence, and over the next several years he painted a number of frescoes. In 1425, he moved to Venice, where he worked on mosaics in the Basilica of San Marco. He later returned to Florence and created frescoes and other paintings that were commissioned from him.

The Battle of San Romano paintings, commissioned by a member of the Bartolini Salimbeni family, depict a minor battle between Florence and Siena that took place in 1432. The first panel, now in the National Gallery in London, shows the Florentine commander Niccoló da Tolentino on a white horse, backed by only 20 soldiers, surprising the Sienese during an attack at San Romano. This panel is a tour de force of war imagery and demonstrates Uccello’s fascination with perspective—a matrix of splintered spears, strewn bodies, and colorful heraldic armor leads the viewer through an exhilarating display of violence and chaos. The second panel, now housed at the Uffizi, features da Tolentino unseating Bernadino della Ciarda, commander of the Sienese forces. The Uffizi panel was once the center of the trio, and it is the only one signed by the artist. The third panel, now in the Louvre, depicts the counterattack of Michelotto da Cotignola, leading reinforcements to supplement the outnumbered Florentine warriors.

With this triptych, Uccello introduced a new subject to 15th-century art—the battle. He also used the panels as an unparalleled experiment in perspective through the use of foreshortening, and he thus set a new course in the art of painting. Lorenzo de’ Medici so admired the paintings that he bought one and comandeered the other two so he could hang them together in his palace.