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School of Art History, Cinema, Classics and Archaeology The University of Melbourne

http://www.elsewhereonline.com.au/place/the-monuments-of-florence-real-and-imagined-in-the-early-renaissance-the-development-of-single-point-perspective-in-painting-by-dr-hugh-hudson

http://www.carnesecchi.eu/Hugh_Hudson1.pdf

Opposite the principal train station of Florence in the northwest quarter of the city stands the imposing church of Santa Maria Novella, distinguished by its slender belltower, long nave, elegant marble façade, and fine courtyards with cypress groves at either side. Inside are some of Italy’s most dazzling late Medieval and Renaissance mural painting cycles: Domenico Ghirlandaio’s Stories of the Virgin and Saint John the Baptist in the magnificent Tornabuoni Chapel behind the high altar, Nardo di Cione’s Purgatory, Hell, Paradise, and Last Judgment in the Strozzi Chapel on the left of the transept, and Filippino Lippi’s Stories of Saints Philip and John the Evangelist in the Filippo Strozzi Chapel on the right of the transept. In the lower nave of the church on the west wall is another chapel with exceptional decoration. Pilasters of white marble with rose marble Corinthian capitals support a rose marble entablature, framing the entrance to a tall, barrel vaulted chapel. In front of the pilasters, heavily robed figures kneel in prayer, while the Virgin and Saint John the Baptist stand inside the chapel on either side of the Trinity: God the Father supporting Christ on the cross, with the Holy Spirit flying between them. This is not a real chapel, of course, but Masaccio’s celebrated mural painting of a fictive chapel, called the Trinity.
As many undergraduate students of art history learn, one of the most distinctive innovations of early Renaissance art in Florence is single-point perspective. Very little is securely known, however, about its rapid development in painting in the first decades of fifteenth century. What conditions in Florence, especially in and around the Santa Maria Novella quarter, during the second half of the 1420s led to the stunning semblance of reality in Masaccio’s Trinity? That is to say, how did painters come into contact with the first developments in perspective, what kind of patrons did it appeal to, and how was it ultimately used? Rather than a conventional altarpiece depicting figures disposed in a shallow space within a gothic frame, or a mural painting of biblical scenes, Masaccio envisaged a virtual chapel with classical architecture, and figures receding into its depths in the nave of the gothic church. Certainly, space was at a premium, where even the patronage rights to individual piers were fought over by wealthy families. In the early Renaissance the chapels in the nave were of different styles, depending on the taste and means of the patrons and the administration of the friars, at the time they were made. Amid competition from rival families, a fictive chapel was perhaps one way to enhance the appearance of a donor’s patronage. But how was this novel solution conceived? Traditionally, the artist, architect, and engineer Filippo Brunelleschi is credited with the invention of single-point perspective and its application to the architectural features in the Trinity. Despite the volume of literature on Renaissance perspective little has been written about the artistic debates surrounding the validity of its introduction into painting, or the social climate that made it desirable in Florence in the 1420s, whether in regard to the painting of a fictive chapel or painting in general.
Standard accounts routinely attribute the invention of single-point perspective to Brunelleschi in the early decades of the fifteenth century, while Donatello is often said to have been the first to apply it to relief sculpture (albeit imprecisely), Masaccio the first to apply it to large-scale painting, and Alberti the first to put it down in writing. Standard accounts also often give the impression that despite minor differences of approach all those who worked with perspective were primarily interested in achieving a resolution of common technical issues, rather than coming to grips with the significance of perspective as an aspect of their specific artistic (or indeed literary) practices. But does the historical and visual evidence sustain such a straightforward synopsis? This article will argue that it does not, and that even in the early Renaissance there are indications of varied views on the significance of single-point perspective and the identity of its key practitioners that should not be discounted.
Brunelleschi was indeed referred to as a ‘perspectivist’ in a brief reference in a letter written in 1413 by the poet Domenico da Prato to Alessandro di Michele Rondinelli (‘prespettivo, ingegnoso uomo Filippo di ser Brunellescho, ragguardevole di virtudi e di fama’), a tantalizingly early but laconic and ambiguous source. The author did not mention any specific work by Brunelleschi; moreover, it is not clear that the term ‘prospettivo’ here refers to an expert in the depiction of perspective, as it is now understood, rather than just a maker of ‘views’. In modern Italian the word for perspective (‘prospettiva’) can allude in a general sense to any panorama, and in the early fifteenth century there is no reason to expect that the word (or any of its cognates) would already have had a particular technical definition, especially in the vocabulary of a poet. The sculptor and architect Filarete did credit Brunelleschi with the invention of the modern rules of perspective in a more technically specific context, in his treatise on architecture, written c. 1460–64, as did Antonio di Tuccio de’ Manetti in his short collection of biographies of Renaissance Florence’s most remarkable men, written c. 1494–97. Clearly, Brunelleschi’s contribution to the development of perspective made an impression on his contemporaries and followers. However, there is no surviving written description of his actual technique, or a perspective depiction definitely by Brunelleschi with which to reconstruct it.
In his extended biography of Brunelleschi written around the 1480s, Manetti famously described two panels by Brunelleschi (now lost), showing perspectival depictions of a view of the Baptistery from the door of the Cathedral, and the Piazza della Signoria in Florence from the end of Via dei Calzaiuoli. Manetti explained how Brunelleschi guaranteed the verisimilitude of his depiction of the Baptistery. There was a tiny hole in the reverse of the panel through which the viewer looked to see a mirror held in place in front of the panel. Looking with one eye, the viewer observed a reflection of the painting of the Baptistery on the obverse of the panel through the hole, that is, from the point determined by Brunelleschi, the point at which the perspective construction gave a convincing impression. Manetti called Brunelleschi’s approach to perspective scientific because it involved a rule ‘setting down properly and rationally the reductions and enlargements of near and distant objects in correct proportion to the distance in which they are shown’. What that rule was Manetti did not say, probably because he did not know. Brunelleschi’s preparatory design for the perspective would have been obscured when he coloured the images, as Manetti said he did. There is no reason to doubt that Brunelleschi’s panels showed a relatively convincing depiction of two of Florence’s most important monuments. However, whether the construction method underlying their depiction was as systematic as Manetti and others have believed is open to question.
Donatello’s beautiful, classicising Saint George and the Dragon marble relief on the base of his statue of Saint George, made for the niche of the Armourers’ Guild on the outside of Orsanmichele, along Via dei Calzaiuoli from the Baptistery (now in the Bargello Museum in Florence), is datable to the late teens of the fifteenth century. It has been described as among the earliest surviving instances of the application of the new perspective. However, linear perspective is confined to the facade of the small building behind the princess and the pavement within, visible through a doorway—minor features in which the perspective seems in fact to be rather irregular. Donatello’s Feast of Herod bronze relief panel for the font of Siena’s Cathedral Baptistery, made in the mid-1420s, shows a brilliantly complex, multi-layered depiction of space. Elements of single-point perspective have been found in the tiles on the floor and the architecture, but there is no overall convergence of the orthogonals (the edges on the sides of box shapes converging to a vanishing point). Thus, the examples most commonly cited of Donatello’s contribution to single-point perspective suggest, if anything, a relaxed approach rather than a systematic one.
Masaccio’s Trinity (c. 1425–27) is probably the earliest surviving painting of the Florentine Renaissance to show a consistent set of converging orthogonals (at least in the barrel vault where the orthogonals are most clearly visible). Yet it is difficult to establish whether it also shows an entirely consistent system of proportionally diminishing spatial values (the forms shown receding into the distance diminishing in size in a proportional manner) because Masaccio did not show the floor of the chapel, which is depicted as though slightly above eye level. Thus, it is difficult to establish the rate of diminution within the depicted space. The ribs of the barrel vault give the strongest indication that there is a consistent system of diminution, although even this indication is ambiguous in parts. It has been assumed that Brunelleschi must have inspired or designed the fictive architecture in this work, and that the appearance of mathematical precision is part of its religious meaning. Certainly, the classical architecture is much more elaborate and close to Brunelleschi’s style than in any other work of Masaccio, and the perspective is much more an important feature of the work than any other work of his, but their collaboration on this painting remains a hypothesis in the absence of any firm evidence.
As the Trinity is such a compelling image and one that is apparently convincing in its depiction of forms in space, writers sometimes give in to the temptation of exaggerating its mathematical precision. In fact it applies perspective inconsistently, but then there is probably no Renaissance painting in which every line and shape conforms precisely to an overall perspective plan. Probably only a modern computer would be capable of such precision. In 1996, J.V. Field presented a thorough review of Renaissance approaches to perspective, including that of the Trinity after making new measurements of the paint surface, concluding: ‘Like other artists of the fifteenth century, Masaccio and Donatello were interested in a form of truth that was essentially visual rather than mathematical, though mathematics might be used in attaining to it. That a picture that is so impressively visually correct as the Trinity can turn out to be mathematically faulty is a warning against confusing artist with mathematician.’ According to Field, the abaci—the flat blocks surmounting the capitals on the columns—are not consistently measured; those at the front are too long to have been planned mathematically.
Furthermore, as Joannides pointed out, the arch over the foremost columns should be foreshortened, since it is seen from below, whereas Masaccio depicted it face on as a series of semi-circles. A series of increasingly flat ellipses would have provided the correct appearance of a foreshortened arch only from a single viewpoint in the church (fairly close to the painting), from all other positions it would have looked distorted. And so Masaccio compromised the single-point perspective of his work, probably in order to create a regular appearance from further away. An analogous phenomenon occurs in Uccello’s Equestrian Monument for Sir John Hawkwood (1436) in Florence Cathedral, where the horse and rider are depicted as seen face on while the sarcophagus on which the horse stands and its base are depicted as seen from below, probably to avoid certain undesirable effects of showing the whole structure in consistent perspective: the horse’s feet would have appeared cut off by the sarcophagus, Hawkwood’s face would have been less clearly visible, and from a distance the horse and rider would have appeared distorted. The idea that Masaccio was the first to create a large-scale painting in something approaching single-point perspective also needs to be treated with caution, as is discussed below.
Alberti’s treatise on painting De Pictura written in Latin in 1435 (and translated into the vernacular as Della Pittura in 1436) includes a shorthand method for producing an accurate view of a scene, which uses a ‘veil’ of squaring through which the artist looks and which they use as a reference for plotting the relationships between forms in the scene to be depicted. Alberti defended this method from critics who said it did not require artists to develop any real understanding of the depiction of objects in space. More complex was his second method, one that provides the two key features that this article takes to constitute the basis of single-point perspective (converging orthogonals and a proportionally diminishing scale of objects receding in space). Essentially, it required the artist to plot where the visual rays between points on the ground plan of the scene to be depicted (using for the example a grid of square paving) would cut the picture plane, using these intersections to locate the transversals in the composition (those straight lines parallel to the picture plane). The method exploits geometry rather than calculation to depict a pavement of squares in perspective, allowing the artist also to determine the appropriate heights of objects depicted on the pavement.
Though more rigorous than any earlier written perspective method, this is not to say that the method is itself highly sophisticated. Alberti frankly admitted at the outset of his text: ‘Mathematicians measure the shapes and forms of things in the mind alone and divorced entirely from matter. We, on the other hand, who wish to talk of things that are visible, will express ourselves in cruder terms.’ Indeed, a recent mathematical analysis of Alberti’s perspective method has found it wanting, in terms of determining the precise relationship between horizontal, vertical, and orthogonal proportions.
Modern art historians have often struggled to accommodate the claims by early writers that one of the protagonists in the development of perspective in early Renaissance Florence was Paolo Uccello (c. 1397–1475). Manetti singled out Uccello among the artists who followed Brunelleschi in the application of perspective, and Giorgio Vasari alternatively credited Uccello and Masaccio with the leading role in the application of perspective to the field of painting. What has made it difficult for these claims to be accepted is Uccello’s non-canonical uses of perspective. While a number of his paintings demonstrate a knowledge of standard single-point perspective (for example, the Hunt in the Forest in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford), throughout his oeuvre numerous instances occur in which he ignored the standard approach, adopting varied and unusual uses (notably, the Nativity in the reserve collection of the Uffizi in Florence, in which the sinopia—the underlying preparatory drawing—depicts a standard perspectival grid, while in the painting on the intonaca—the final layer of plaster—there are two vanishing points at the lateral edges creating a strangely distorted appearance of space). Furthermore, even when Uccello used perspective in a more-or-less straightforward manner, he sometimes did so ironically, as in the Battle paintings in the National Gallery, London, and the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence, in which he contrived to show the broken lances on the ground, and even the tufts of grass growing thereon, in a perspectival grid. How could a founder of canonical perspective have used it so inconsistently and anti-illusionistically?
Loath to ignore the early sources, some modern writers have attempted either to discredit them, or to make him the exception that proves the rule, as it were. Thus, Uccello has appeared in modern literature as a late follower of his peers whose influence on the development of perspective was actually inconsequential, or an aberration, an eccentric personality, simultaneously obsessed with perspective and yet unable or unwilling to adhere seriously to its most important rules. However, historical evidence, discussed below, suggests Uccello was professionally and socially linked to the milieu in which the new approach to perspective found its earliest expression in painting. Specialist writers on Uccello have also suggested that he may have been providing a commentary on the work of Brunelleschi and Alberti (neither primarily a painter), by pointing out the artificial restrictions that single-point perspective creates. Uccello was by no means the only painter in the early decades of the fifteenth century to resist or ignore the strictures of single-point perspective. In three respects Uccello’s approach belongs to a more complex reading of the significance of perspective in the late Medieval and early Renaissance period: in its recognition of the technical, expressive, and philosophical or theological limitations inherent in standard single-point perspective.
While single-point perspective created using the second method described by Alberti generates a consistent diminution of scale in forms as they recede into space in front of the viewer, this is at the expense of visual consistency across the picture plane. The further forms are laterally from the centre, the greater their distortion. This is a well-known phenomenon in specialist perspective studies, but one to which the common viewer of artworks, accustomed to conventions of visual representation, would probably give little consideration under normal conditions. Piero della Francesca addressed the problem in the thirtieth proposition of the first book, and the twelfth proposition of the second book, of De Prospectiva Pingendi (On Perspective for Painting), referring to unnamed critics of perspective who doubted its rationality, but he did not accept that peripheral distortion invalidated the application of perspective to the visual arts. Leonardo da Vinci returned to the problem in Manuscript A of his Discorsi. Art historians agree that Leonardo understood the problem of lateral distortion, however, there is disagreement as to what approach or approaches he may have pursued to overcome the problem.
In other words, the Florentine single-point perspective method may not be an entirely mathematically precise method of depicting space in two dimensions, and is not an entirely consistent approximation of it, but is rather a system for creating a degree of illusion of regularly constructed space, one that privileges the diminution of forms away from the picture plane. The inherent difficulties in correlating the depiction of three dimensional objects in two dimensional space with the biological reality of vision were not so much resolved by Renaissance theorists as minimised through limiting the angle of vision (to avoid lateral distortion) and creating a pre-determined position for a viewer’s eye (to allow the artist to create the most convincing impression of depth from a single view and to avoid the complexities of binocular vision). For practical reasons neither strategy would find general acceptance in painting: artists needed at times to depict wide angles of vision to create broad settings for their subjects and viewers usually move around in front of artworks—looking with both eyes! Furthermore, as explained in reference to Uccello’s Equestrian Monument, other aspects of single-point perspective can at times be at odds with the desire for clearly legible forms in painting.
One aspect of Uccello’s work that writers have not failed to praise is his imaginative and innovative imagery, replete with fantastically elaborate dragons, fierce thunderstorms, the pageantry of war, and the elegance of the Renaissance hunt. Might not his unconventional use of perspective be associated with his quest for novelty and the liberation of imagery from the monotony of canonical standards? A similar suggestion has been made to explain why most fourteenth-century artists, who were not that far from achieving single-point perspective, might have resisted it, and why even many fifteenth-century artists who evidently were capable of using the technique often chose not to. There is a well-known written source that also suggests such an interpretation. In the introduction to his handbook on painting, Cennino Cennini cited two reasons why painting can be considered a higher art: its basis in theory on the one hand, and its poetic licence on the other. For Cennini the painter is not constrained to follow theoretical considerations, indeed the occasional poetic disregard for theory is part of what distinguishes a painter from a lesser artisan. Recently, it has been proposed that his handbook may have been written as a codification of late fourteenth-century artists’ practices for the purpose of allowing the painters’ guild to better oversee their members’ professional activities. Thus, his sentiment might well have expressed an orthodox point of view. Would the development of single-point perspective in the decades following the writing of his treatise negate such a view?
An indication that the rational application of geometry, on which single-point perspective is based, might not have convinced all commentators of its ability to provide a framework for representing the complexity of the world (and the universe) in the early Renaissance period is provided by the writings of the humanist Nicholas of Cusa, called Cusanus, particularly his most famous work, De Docta Ignorantia (On Learned Ignorance), completed in February 1440. Although Cusanus affirmed that God created the world using arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy (the quadrivium—four of the liberal arts comprising the basic courses of a Medieval university) he used logical arguments to demonstrate the incompatibility of standard geometry and the concept of infinity, or put another way, the incommensurability of the human mind and divinity. In one instance he argued that an infinitely large circle would be equivalent to an infinitely long straight line whose circumference is everywhere and whose centre is nowhere. If this sounds paradoxical, that was evidently Cusanus’ intention, to show that the finite logical tools available to the human mind are insufficient to understand God’s infinite reality. Cusanus’ demonstrations of the ambiguities of infinite geometry parallel to some extent Uccello’s use of perspective, in as much as both highlight the limits of geometry, rather than its ability to represent a clearly comprehensible order.
Some artists and humanists might have had differing views about single-point perspective as an orthodoxy, however, Florentine patrons may have had their own intentions in its use as well. The Trinity’s verisimilitude is, of course, not restricted to the architectural setting. Two of the most riveting aspects of the work are the life-size figures of the presumed donors. They are unusually depicted without any kind of framework (fictive or real) around them. Instead, they kneel in front of the fictive architectural structure surrounding the sacred figures. Since most of the original edges of the painting have been destroyed, there could possibly have been a surrounding frame, but in any event, the directness of their depiction is innovative, posed between the viewer and the sacred figures, rather than among the sacred figures, as was more customary.
While their identity remains uncertain, documents provide a clue: a tomb slab near the painting was dedicated to Domenico Lenzi and his family, presumably when Domenico died in January 1427. Little is known about Domenico as an individual, and the family as a whole has not been the subject of a sustained study as other families of their time have. Scholars of the Trinity have drawn attention to the fact that a Benedetto di Domenico Lenzi became Prior at Santa Maria Novella c. 1426–28, and that a Lorenzo di Piero Lenzi (Domenico’s cousin) was Gonfaloniere di Giustizia (effectively the mayor) in August and September 1425, as evidence for the extended family’s possible influence over the commission. Further information about the social standing of the Lenzi and another family, the Carnesecchi, that commissioned paintings with conspicuous displays of perspective before and after the Trinity can help to explain the circumstances in which the taste for perspective in painting initially developed.
Disparate sources indicate that the Lenzi grew in prominence in the Santa Maria Novella quarter from the late fourteenth century, without ever joining the inner-circle of the most powerful families in Florence. They owned adjacent properties on the Piazza di Ognissanti on the north bank of the Arno, a little south of Santa Maria Novella. Being well outside the second city wall of Florence, this location did not represent the most desirable real estate in the city. Nevertheless, some time before 1470, two brothers and an uncle of the family—Lorenzo and Pietro di Anfrione and Francesco Lenzi—built an impressive palazzo on their properties, which currently serves as the French Consulate.
The fact that the palazzo was built by three members of the family says something about the importance of collective patronage in early Renaissance Florence. Even if Domenico is the patron represented in the Trinity, the commission would have been planned in partnership with the Dominican friars, and served as a collective monument for Domenico, his wife, and his descendents (the tomb slab was inscribed for him and his family ‘Domenico di Lenzi et Suorem’), and served more generally as a symbol of the success of the extended Lenzi family. An Anfrione di Lorenzo di Piero Lenzi is known to have held the important office of Operaio (building supervisor) at the Cathedral from June 1436. . Based on their patronymics (the string of names identifying the individual, their father, their grandfather and so on), it seems that Lorenzo, Anfrione, and, Lorenzo and Pietro represent three generations of a significant dynasty of power and patronage in Florence.
The most prominent member of the family was Lorenzo di Piero Lenzi, whose name appears frequently in sources in this period. In late 1412 and early 1413 a man of that name was a leader and representative of the Guelf party (Parte Guelfa), a semi-official association predominantly representing the interests of Florence’s conservative, oligarchic families, and was again in 1424–25. In 1416 a Lorenzo di Piero Lenzi appears in a ledger of the Confraternity of Saint Peter Martyr, the company of laity and friars based in Santa Maria Novella, which exercised considerable influence over the administration of patronage at the convent and church. In the same year a Lorenzo di Piero Lenzi appears in the records of the Magistrato dei Pupilli, a communal institution providing judges and notaries to administer the property of orphans. In 1434 a Lorenzo di Piero Lenzi sold Paolo Uccello a house in Via della Scala, perhaps the Lorenzo Lenzi who was among five supporters of the Medici threatened with exile by anti-Medici officials in that year. Granted, there may well have been more than one person with that name in Florence in the early fifteenth century, but the fact remains that the Lenzi family were conspicuous members of Florentine society at the time, particularly in the Santa Maria Novella quarter. That they buried their dead in the principal church of the quarter, as well as in Ognissanti, their local church, confirms their high social standing. In addition, the Lenzi had a chapel dedicated to Saint Catherine in the church of the Spedale degli Innocenti.
Paolo Uccello’s association with the Lenzi may not have been entirely casual. His wealthy and powerful relative from his mother’s family, Deo Beccuti, owned land in Castello, a number of kilometres northwest of Florence, an area favoured by the leading patrician families of the Santa Maria Novella quarter because of its proximity to the quarter, its location on the main road to Prato, and its elevated position on a foothill of Mount Morello, affording a view over the surrounding countryside and the city of Florence. The tax return of a Giovanni di Domenico Lenzi shows that in 1427 he owned land in Castello neighbouring that belonging to Deo Beccuti, as well as a house in Florence on the Piazza di Ognissanti, next to his kinsman Lorenzo di Piero Lenzi. Any knowledge Uccello might have gained through his relative about the landowners in the Santa Maria Novella quarter, such as the Lenzi, would have been helpful when he bought his house from one of them in 1434, but landowners were also important art patrons, so Uccello’s interest in the Lenzi family and other prominent landowning families in the quarter would have been a professional concern. As it happens, Anfrione di Lorenzo di Piero Lenzi was among the operai who oversaw the final stages of the commission for Uccello’s Equestrian Monument for Sir John Hawkwood in the Cathedral in 1436.
The idea of an indirect association of Uccello through his relative Deo Beccuti with prominent landowners and patrons in and around the Santa Maria Novella quarter is supported by the important case of the Carnesecchi Chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore, the modest church on Via de’ Cerretani, mid-way between Santa Maria Novella and the Cathedral. The sombre Medieval interior is now crowded with Baroque decoration, however, it previously contained a number of important Renaissance paintings by Uccello, Masolino, Masaccio, and Botticelli. The most distinguished early Renaissance survival in the church is Giovanni di Francesco’s small Crucifixion, painted on a blue background in an arch, high in the chapel on the left of the main altar. The decoration of the Carnesecchi Chapel, dedicated to Saint Catherine of Alexandria, was provided for in the will of Paolo di Berto di Grazino de’ Carnesecchi, who died on the 4th of February 1428. He was a prominent citizen, holding numerous important government offices, and he was, like Lorenzo di Piero Lenzi, a leader of the Guelf party in the second and third decades of the century.
A tax return of his sons Simone, Antonio, and Giovanni shows they were concerned with the financial maintenance of the chapel as directed in their father’s will (‘La chapella di santa chatérina di santa maria maggiore de avere per testimente di nostro padre ognni ano due […] di valuta’), and an entry in a ledger of Santa Maria Novella shows that his heirs also paid for commemorative ceremonies to be held in the principal church of the quarter (‘Rede d[i] paolo d[i] berto carnesechi dono dare f[iorin]j 5 lanno p[er] i fino/ i dieci annj p[er] uno rinovali […] pietaza p[er] […]ldecto paolo mori ad[i] 4 d[i] febraio 1427’). These services no doubt reflected the family’s desire to achieve recognition in the principal church of the quarter at this time, even if, unlike the Lenzi, they might not have been able to afford to commission a lasting monument there.
The Carnesecchi altarpiece, although broken up after 1653, can be reconstructed from earlier descriptions and its surviving panels. The commission was granted jointly to Uccello, Masolino, and Masaccio, three of the leading avant-garde painters in early Renaissance Florence. Vasari recorded that Uccello painted an Annunciation and Four Evangelists in the vaulted summit (now lost). Following the demolition of the chapel, an Annunciation by Uccello (the same one?) was recorded in guidebooks as fixed to a column in the church until the early nineteenth century, after which there are no further notices of it. Vasari made remarkable claims for Uccello’s contribution to the project, describing:

…an Annunciation in fresco, in which he made a building worthy of consideration, a new and difficult thing for those times, being the first that showed in a fine manner to artists and with grace and proportion, [it] showed how to make the lines escape [towards a vanishing point] and to show space on a plane, that is little and small, so much so that something that appears far seems large: and they who colour with good judgment of this, with grace adding the shadows in their place and the highlights, with colours, deceive the eye, such that the picture appears real and in relief. And not satisfied with doing this, he wanted also to show the great difficulty of some columns foreshortened by means of perspective, which bend round and break the corner of the vault, where there are the four Evangelists: a thing considered fine and difficult; and truly Paolo was ingenious and skillful in his profession.

Of the three scenes in the altarpiece described by Vasari, the panel depicting Saint Catherine is lost, the central panel showing the Virgin and Child has not been seen since it was stolen in the 1920s, although its appearance is known from photographs, and the Saint Julian is now housed in the Museo d’Arte Sacra in Florence. The two panels known to modern art historians are now attributed to Masolino, on stylistic grounds. Vasari also described three predella panels: a Scene from the Life of Saint Catherine and a Nativity, which are lost, and a Scene from the Life of Saint Julian, which has been identified with the small and badly damaged panel in the Museo Horne, Florence, on the basis of the analysis of its panel support.
From Vasari’s precise description it is known the Carnesecchi Chapel was located on the north wall of the church, beside a door providing access to the street leading to the Baptistery (Via de’ Cerretani). The left aisle of the nave on the north side is not particularly wide, and so the chapel was probably not a space separated by walls from the rest of the church, but an altar with an altarpiece against the wall. However, the fact that the altarpiece was vaulted suggests it was of some depth, more solid than a flat panel. Vasari praised in particular Uccello’s depiction of columns, illusionistically foreshortened within the curve of the vault at the top of the altarpiece. It seems that Uccello overcame the constraints imposed by the format of the altarpiece to create an impression of architecture in perspective.
Paul Joannides argued that a notice of the chapel by Paolo Carnesecchi in January 1427 describing it as furnished (‘fornita’) meant that the decoration had been completed by that time. The commission would most likely have been completed before the end of 1425, by which time Masolino was in Hungary and Uccello was in Venice. Joannides dated Masolino’s contribution, and so presumably the whole commission, to around 1423 on stylistic evidence and the large workload Masolino had around 1424–25. Thus the work most likely predates Masaccio’s Trinity and may well have exerted some influence over it.
How Uccello, Masolino, and Masaccio came to collaborate on the commission is unknown. Anna Padoa Rizzo suggested that Uccello’s involvement may have been facilitated by his mother’s family. The del Beccuto and the Carnesecchi families each owned large properties adjacent to Piazza di Santa Maria Maggiore, indicating that they were among the leading citizens of the parish. The church would have been a focus for their religious and social activities. Like the Carnesecchi, the del Beccuto had patronage rights within the church, including a chapel dedicated to Saint Blaise. An eighteenth-century genealogy of the del Beccuto family in the Florentine State Archive shows that Deo Beccuti was in fact married to one Andreola di Zanobi Carnesecchi, adding some documentary support to the hypothesis of a social connection between Uccello and his patron. Like the del Beccuto and Lenzi families, the Carnesecchi also owned land in Castello, another indication of their comparable social status.
The taste for avant-garde perspective in art seems to have run in the Carnesecchi family. It was probably Paolo di Berto’s nephew, Bernardo di Cristofano Carnesecchi, who commissioned Domenico Veneziano’s Virgin and Child with God the Father, the Holy Spirit and Saints in the early 1440s for a street tabernacle in front of one of his houses on the Canto de’ Carnesecchi. The tabernacle was located at the point where the present day Via de’ Banchi and Via de’ Panzani meet, between Santa Maria Novella and Santa Maria Maggiore. The detached paintings from the central scene and two fragments of saints’ heads from the sides of the tabernacle are all that survive, now housed in the National Gallery, London. The Virgin and Child are shown on an enormous throne depicted in steep perspective, composed of distinctively Uccellesque, simple, geometric forms, notably the spheres mounted directly on the top of the throne, reminiscent of the spheres decorating the tops of architectural features throughout Uccello’s mural paintings of the Stories of the Virgin and Saint Steven in the Cathedral in Prato, painted c. 1435–36. Interestingly, like his uncle and Lorenzo di Piero Lenzi, Bernardo Carnesecchi was a member of the aristocratic Guelf party. This might be an indication of the kind of patron who favoured artists that contributed to the early development of perspective, since as shall be discussed below, the Guelf party was itself a patron of Brunelleschi and Donatello.
While Vasari sometimes credited aspects of the development of perspective to Uccello and sometimes Masaccio, it would be impossible, and pointless in any case, to try to establish who made the greater contribution first. What is known is that if the Lenzi (or the Dominican friars) were looking for a painter for their ‘chapel’ in 1426 or 1427 Uccello would have been unavailable until at least 12 July 1427, when Deo Beccuti submitted his tax return on his behalf, because Uccello was away designing mosaics for San Marco in Venice. Masolino is thought not to have returned to Florence before mid 1427. So, of the collaborators on the Carnesecchi altarpiece, Masaccio appears to have been the only one who was available. If Uccello pioneered a taste for perspectival art in and around the Santa Maria Novella quarter, on which other artists subsequently capitalised, where might his own interest in it have originated?
In the crucial early decades of the century it has been all but impossible to find substantial evidence of the context in which Uccello’s perspective developed. The earliest surviving paintings that can be attributed with some certainty to Uccello are most probably from the late 1420s or early 1430s (the Creation Stories in the Chiostro Verde of Santa Maria Novella, the del Beccuto Virgin and Child in the Museo di San Marco, Florence, the Annunciation in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and the Saint George and the Dragon in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne). There may, however be a clue in Eve Borsook’s observation of the similarity between Brunelleschi’s reported habit of using squared paper for accuracy when drawing the classical monuments in Rome, and Uccello’s use of squared drawings to enlarge studies for mural paintings. The earliest surviving squared drawing is Uccello’s Study for the Equestrian Monument for Sir John Hawkwood, housed in the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi, Florence, although the preparatory squaring visible in the figure of the Virgin in Masaccio’s Trinity shows that the technique had already been in use for some time. Where might painters such as Masaccio and Uccello have become familiar with this aspect of an architect’s practice? In fact, the earliest work by Uccello referred to in a nearly contemporary document is a mosaic he created at San Marco in Venice in 1425. While the documented figure of Saint Peter on the façade has been destroyed, another mosaic of a wheel interlaced with ribbons inside the atrium has been convincingly attributed to Uccello, and a beautiful, geometrically designed pavement in coloured stone of a stellated dodecahedron in perspective under the door of Saint Peter (the current main exit) has been plausibly attributed to him as well.
Thus, Uccello’s art had an architectural aspect from early in his career. Unlike drawings and paintings, in which an artist can modify their design as they work, making pavements required a thoroughly pre-conceived plan and great precision in the cutting of the valuable stones. To avoid mistakes, the masons may well have made cartoons of the artist’s designs, and these might have been enlarged from the artist’s drawing using squared paper. Whether Uccello was involved in this kind of design in Florence before his trip to Venice is unknown, but he probably could not have got the commission without having some prior experience.
In the fifteenth century the most important examples of mosaics, polychrome stonework, and classical architectural features in Florence were in the Baptistery. Because of its cultural and religious importance it had always been adorned with expensive and elaborate ornaments. The significance of its fittings as a source of inspiration for Florentine artists and architects is well known. Diane F. Zervas has argued that the all’antica style pioneered by Brunelleschi and Donatello in the early decades of the fifteenth century, was championed by the Guelf party in its commissions to these artists for the tabernacle and statue of Saint Louis made for the outside of Orsanmichele and the new audience hall of its palazzo, because the antique references lent visual authority to the Party’s claims to a venerable history in the Florentine Republic. In particular, Brunelleschi’s borrowing of classical architectural elements from the Baptistery represented an appropriation of symbols of Florence’s ‘classical’ past. The Chancellor Leonardo Bruni had argued that the Baptistery provided a distinguished classical lineage for Florence’s modern Republic, having been built as a temple by Romans during their Republican era. In fact, the Baptistery’s origins cannot be established conclusively, but it may have originated in the seventh century and been rebuilt in the eleventh or twelfth.
That Brunelleschi depicted the Baptistery in one of the two panels in which he is said to have pioneered perspective was probably no accident. His two ways of looking at the Baptistery are no doubt related: viewing it as a textbook of classical architectural features to be copied and translated into his own commissions, and viewing it as an exercise in perspective projection. The prestige of Rome’s classical monuments justified Brunelleschi’s trip there and the careful efforts he made to record them accurately using squared paper, and much the same might have been true of the Baptistery. Perhaps this is where the origins of single-point perspective should be looked for. The projection of a grid onto the picture plane is conceivably a first step to the development of single-point perspective, in the laying of a regular, geometric matrix over the visual field. This finds is most direct corollary in Alberti’s ‘veil’, described earlier. The artist then has to project the grid onto the ground plan as well, to consider the scene as though looking at it from the side as well as the front, and to realise that the two viewpoints together will provide the required proportions for a single-point perspective representation of the subject.
If single-point perspective originated in the context of Florence’s centre, in the study of its most prestigious monuments by its most important architect who was working on commissions intended to enhance the city’s monuments through references to its ‘classical’ past, its further development in painting seems to have taken place somewhat further away. In particular, in and around the Santa Maria Novella quarter, upwardly mobile families such as the Carnesecchi and the Lenzi were intent on advancing their interests towards the centres of power. As members of the Guelf party they would have been familiar with Brunelleschi’s and Donatello’s commissions for expensive architectural monuments and bronze sculpture for the Guelf party. Edgar Hertlein has presented a strong case for seeing the Trinity as containing allusions to Guelf imagery, not least in the formal similarity of its classical architecture with the tabernacle at Orsanmichele commissioned by the Guelf party from Donatello to house his gilded bronze statue of Saint Louis of Toulouse. Even if the Carnesecchi and the Lenzi were not quite rich enough to afford such expensive monuments for themselves, they were, nevertheless, sufficiently well off to commission painters such as Uccello and Masaccio to emulate these achievements using increasingly sophisticated and illusionistic techniques. Uccello and Masaccio were among the first painters to adapt the new perspective to large-scale paintings, and in doing so they quickly discovered its limitations.
It is telling that the Carnesecchi altarpiece was probably a substantial edifice, and the Trinity is on a monumental scale. It seems that the potential for perspective to evoke grand architectural settings even in constrained physical, and perhaps financial, contexts was appreciated by early patrons. Like many patrician families in Florence, the Lenzi would have been keen to project an image of their wealth and antiquity, and in this context the choice of fictive classical architecture for the Trinity might be interpreted as a strategy aimed at this end, much as the Guelf party’s taste for expensive classicising monuments bespoke its claim to an ancient and privileged position in the commune. In translating the theory of single-point perspective from its inherently limited scope to a monumental scale, artists such as Uccello and Masaccio were virtually obliged to compromise some of its principles, and in the case of Uccello, he seems to have made a virtue out of necessity by highlighting the artificial nature and theoretical limitations of perspective to such an extent that it can indeed be said to have become a part of his subject matter.

Dr. Hugh Hudson, Honorary Fellow, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne, 2006.

http://www.elsewhereonline.com.au/place/from-via-della-scala-to-the-cathedral-social-spaces-and-the-visual-arts-in-paolo-uccello2019s-florence-by-dr-hugh-hudson/view

http://www.carnesecchi.eu/Hugh_Hudson2.pdf

This article reconstructs the experience of Florence’s urban spaces from the point of view of one of its most intriguing early Renaissance artists: Paolo Uccello. It assesses the evidence for his personal life and social status, and discusses his professional activity along an itinerary from his home on Via della Scala in the west of Florence to the Cathedral in its centre. In so doing it illustrates the significance of urban spaces as socially charged sites in the life of an artist and the web of associations that connected Florentine society with its communal spaces and artworks. Special attention is given to Uccello’s Nativity mural painting from ¬the cloister of the hospital of Santa Maria della Scala, whose iconography may reflect the support given by Florentine families and government to orphans—a significant aspect of the history of Uccello’s mother’s family and of his own experience as a young man.

As every visitor to the city knows, Florence retains the imprint of its history in its densely packed urban character, its streets lined with imposing Renaissance palaces, forbidding medieval towers, crooked alleyways, paved squares, and the Arno river bisecting the city east to west, in a valley bounded by hills to the north and south. Rising above the city, now as in the fifteenth century when it was built, the terracotta tiles, marble ribs, and lantern of the cupola of the Cathedral can be seen from most parts of the city, a constant reminder of the pre-eminent achievements of the early Renaissance period. Nevertheless, the city has undergone a constant process of transformation, involving the opening up of communal spaces within its urban fabric, such as piazzas, churches, convents, hospitals, cloisters, and loggias. Moreover, streets have been straightened, and intersections widened to aid the flow of traffic. Such disruptions to the urban fabric inevitably cause the loss of built heritage, however, they also create opportunities for urban regeneration, and in particular the employment of the visual arts to adorn new spaces. How, then, did the life of a Florentine early Renaissance artist intersect with the city’s network of communal spaces?

At the end of the nineteenth century, Guido Carocci, Royal Inspector of Excavations and Monuments for the city of Florence and one of the most intrepid scholars of its Renaissance history, created a map of the centre of the city showing the names of the heads of the city’s households where they lived in 1427. It was informed by catasto records, a vast archive of tax documents now housed in the Florentine State Archive, rich in information about the material lives of the city’s citizens. Few artists were included in Carocci’s map, as few were sufficiently wealthy to own valuable real estate near the city centre. An exception is Filippo Brunelleschi, artist, architect, and engineer, whose family home was opposite the small church of San Michele Berteldi in the inner part of the northwest quarter of the city. Carocci’s map shows that on his way to work at the Cathedral Brunelleschi would have left his house, turning left into the Piazza degli Agli, and then right into the Via dei Guidalotti, subsequently leading into the Canto dei Pecori. His view of the Cathedral would have been blocked by the building over the archway, called the Volta dei Pecori (demolished in the nineteenth century), beside the archiepiscopal palace on Piazza San Giovanni. Upon entering the piazza, the most important project of his career would have come into view: the cupola of the Cathedral. Although the street names have changed, as well as the configuration of the city blocks and many of the buildings surrounding them, it would be possible—approximately—to follow in Brunelleschi’s footsteps today.

If such historical reconstruction seems merely picturesque, or even banal, it is nevertheless pertinent to a discussion of the way artists negotiated Florentine society through its spaces. The intense competition for influence over space in the city by individuals, families, the church, guilds, and various government bodies, is brought to light in the individual’s journey through the city. Their progress embodies a negotiation of social boundaries, from the individual’s quarters within the family home to that of the nuclear or extended family (in Brunelleschi’s case he grew up with his brothers in the paternal home that he eventually inherited), into the neighbourhood dominated by the most powerful landowners (the Agli and Guidalotti families who gave their names to its streets and piazzas), and moving towards the centre where the city’s major religious and communal institutions held sway (the administration of the Cathedral’s construction, was delegated by the Signoria to the wealthy and powerful Wool Guild).

For artists less closely tied to the Florentine establishment than Brunelleschi, their social experience of the city could be marginal despite their culturally important works and posthumous fame, and, indeed, it was sometimes further marginalised by writers. The sixteenth-century art historian, Giorgio Vasari, peppered his Le vite de’ piú eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori italiani (Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Painters, Sculptors, and Architects) with accounts of the friendships, rivalries, and love affairs of his subjects in the urban mis-en-scène of the city. Vasari’s anecdotes cast certain early Renaissance artists in a negative light through the literary strategy of setting them in humble domestic or street settings. Although the painter Andrea del Castagno is documented as living near the Cathedral at one point of his life, he was not a citizen of Florence, and so was something of a social outsider. In Vasari’s Le vite his character becomes positively malevolent. According to Vasari, while painting the Equestrian Monument for Niccolò Tolentino in the Cathedral, a boy passing by knocked Andrea’s ladder and for his carelessness was chased all the way to the Canto de’ Pazzi by the artist. Since ‘Canto de’ Pazzi’ literally means the ‘corner of the madmen’, and is located around the corner from the Cathedral, Vasari seems to be implying that Andrea’s preciousness eventually drove him round the bend! Further on in the same life Vasari claimed that Andrea became so jealous of Domenico Veneziano’s much-praised tabernacle painting Virgin and Child with God the Father, the Holy Spirit, and Saints, located at the Canto de’ Carnesecchi near the church of Santa Maria Novella, that he plotted falsely to become Domenico’s friend, winning the secret of oil painting from him by deception, and then mortally wounding him in the street. That the latter episode was fictitious became apparent in the nineteenth century when it was discovered that Veneziano actually outlived Castagno.

There has been considerable academic interest recently in the idea of space as a means of investigating social relations in history. In particular, spaces outside buildings seem alluring for their potential to focus attention on less well known aspects of history, that is, history relating to subjects other than large state, church, or family institutions, especially concerning the lower classes, and behaviours viewed as anti-authoritarian, anti-social, or criminal. For art history too, locating the residences of Florentine Renaissance artists, describing the neighbourhoods, recreating their social networks, and identifying the original locations of their artworks, are important for creating a detailed and historically meaningful picture of their lives. Moreover, this approach is essential for creating a context within which to interpret their works, not merely as isolated aesthetic objects, but as part of the rich fabric of personal and social relations in which they were created. It has been applied with an emphasis on artists’ social connections with each other at the neighbourhood level, as Nicholas Eckstein has done for the community of mostly lower-class artists of the Gonfalone (one of four administrative sub-divisions of each of the city’s quarters) of the Green Dragon. Alternatively, it has been applied with an emphasis on the social connections of an artist’s patrician patrons, as John Spencer has done for Andrea del Castagno. Bill Kent has since identified a need for the investigation of the relationship between the social world of Florentine artists (of the artisan class) and that of their patrician patrons. This article seeks to represent a cross-section of an artist’s social world by examining their experience of traversing the gamut of the city’s spaces from a peripheral street to the city’s most venerable cultural monuments in its centre.

Artworks could serve purely personal functions for the individuals who commissioned or acquired them, as objects providing sensual pleasure, preserving memories, or serving a devotional purpose. However, art was commissioned above all to be seen in communal spaces in which an audience was available to receive whatever messages a patron might wish to communicate. The distinction between private and public in the Renaissance, as now, was often blurred or changeable. Certain domestic spaces were regularly made accessible to particular members of the public for social, commercial, or government transactions, while, conversely, private influence could be exerted over public spaces in various ways, such as the sponsoring of building works in or near communal spaces on the condition that the improvements bore the patron’s familial insignia.

Art was commissioned to decorate furniture and rooms inside the Renaissance home, in particular to commemorate marriages between families, such as the numerous surviving cassone bearing the coats of arms of the bride and groom. These acted as a constant reminder of the social alliances forged by a couple’s marriage. Art distinguished the façade of the home: coats of arms carved in stone were frequently placed at the property lines of buildings to mark the extent of the family property, or over the main door to communicate information to visitors about the occupants. The ubiquitous paintings and sculptures of the Virgin and Child in tabernacles on the outside of houses acted as talismans for the family and passers by.

For well-to-do families artistic patronage usually extended to the local church, where patronage rights over a chapel would be obtained to provide a fitting place to bury and commemorate the family’s dead, and to demonstrate the family’s wealth and power in the neighbourhood. Chapels could be furnished with stone altars covered with expensive fabrics, painted altarpieces, metal candelabra, wooden crucifixes, carved tombstones, and coats of arms. The rich might obtain patronage rights at the principal church of the quarter, in addition to or in preference to, the local church. The wealthiest citizens supported charitable institutions in their neighbourhood and elsewhere in the city, such as hospitals, which also often required a degree of adornment in the form of architectural finishes, sculptures, mural paintings, and panel paintings. Many wealthy families also owned agricultural land and villas beyond the city walls, extending the geographical scope of private patronage considerably.

The most significant patronage in the city was organised in a corporate fashion through confraternities, and civic institutions such as the guilds, the Parte Guelfa (a semi-official institution representing above all the interests of Florence’s conservative oligarchy), and the government’s various bodies. The building of churches, large hospitals, and other major infrastructure projects devoured sums of money that only very large institutions could afford, nevertheless, powerful individuals and families could still hope to influence the decision-making processes of corporate patrons. Thus, a variety of communal spaces within the city, from intimate domestic rooms to public squares, provided contexts for the commissioning of artworks that served to identify their functions to the public, to remind people who owned them or who had provided for them, and to render them dignified and worthy of respect.

A case study of an artist’s relationship with the social spaces of their city, challenging because of the limited direct evidence, is nevertheless valuable for Paolo Uccello (c. 1397–1475). While a legendary figure of early Renaissance art history, his biography has remained for the most part mysterious, obscured by Vasari’s caricature-like sketch of his personality, summed up in four piquant adjectives: ‘solitary, strange, melancholy and poor’ (‘solitario, strano, malinconico e povero’). Granted, the innovative and often fantastic nature of Uccello’s imagery makes his artistic personality seem singular, and for that reason intriguing. However, archival evidence provides a quite different picture of his life than Vasari’s literary topos of the poor, socially isolated artist.

In one of Uccello’s tax returns he indicated that at about the age of 37 he had acquired: ‘a house for me to live in, located in the parish of Santa Lucia near Ognissanti in Via della Scala, [surrounded on its sides by] first, the street, second and third, Gabriello the furrier, and fourth Cristofano the cook, bought on 21 April 1434 from Lorenzo di Piero Lenzi [for] 110 florins’. A later tax return shows he lived in the same house until the end of his life, that is, over a period of more than four decades. From the detailed information Uccello provided about his neighbours, it can be seen how Carocci was able to work out the overall pattern of the city’s occupation from individual tax returns, the information fitting together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Carocci was helped by the fact that many of the major streets of Florence still follow the Renaissance layout, albeit approximately. The long, straight Via della Scala takes much the same route now from the bottom of Piazza di Santa Maria Novella west to the former boundary of the third city wall (since demolished), as it was depicted in the print of the city made shortly after Uccello’s lifetime: the street is visible in the so-called Chain Map woodcut of c. 1510 (Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin), a copy of an engraving of the 1480s, of which only a fragment survives.

Judging from the depiction of the buildings on the part of the street where Uccello lived, near the church of Santa Lucia (even if they represent only an approximation of the buildings that actually lined the street), the low price of Uccello’s house, its distance from the centre of the city, and the blue-collar professions of his neighbours, his domicile would have been a modest one. Nevertheless, Uccello was not poor, as Vasari would have it. In addition to his house in the city, he owned agricultural land at Ugnano, a few kilometres west of the city, from about the age of 28 (if not earlier) until his old age. In 1455, 1458, and 1459 he added to his property there with successive purchases of land. He seems only ever to have increased his land holdings, never to have sold off these investments. Uccello certainly came into contact with the poor, as we learn from a tax return in which he informs the tax officials of a debt owed to him, but not likely to be recovered, by one of his tenant farmers who ‘is poor [and] has nothing’.

Topographically, the northwest quarter of the city, comprising the segment of land in the angle between a point just west of the Piazza di San Giovanni in the city centre, the north bank of the Arno river running to the west, and the road to the Fortezza da Basso (corresponding in part to the present-day Via Faenza) covers much of the administrative Santa Maria Novella quarter, the area surrounding the Dominican church and convent renowned for its patrician families, their impressive palaces, and the lavishly decorated churches they patronised. However, wealth was not evenly distributed in the quarter. Samuel Kline Cohn Jr has argued that the redevelopments that resulted in the opening up of the dense urban fabric in the centre of Florence had a disproportionate effect on members of the artisan and labouring classes. From the late fourteenth century to the end of the fifteenth, the lower classes tended to be redistributed towards the periphery of the city. In Uccello’s time, this seems to have been true of the northwest part of the city. The rich tended to live and conduct their business closer to the centre of the city, within the boundaries of the second city wall. For example, the shops of wealthy wool merchants in the quarter seem to have clustered around the street running between San Michele Berteldi and Santa Trinita (now the Via de’ Tornabuoni), as well as along the Via della Vigna Nuova, while further away from the centre, along the edge of the river the workshops of wool processors were located in a less densely built-up area, where water was used in the dirty and foul smelling procedures of washing and dying fleece. The area was also popular with tanners, and the son of one such tanner, Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni, is better known as Sandro Botticelli (c. 1444–1510). He lived in the parish of Santa Lucia after 1470, near Uccello’s house.

Even though Uccello’s career intersected for some time with that of Brunelleschi in the Cathedral (Uccello executed two mural paintings and designed three stained glass windows there between 1436 and 1444), the distance he travelled between work and home was further, and traversed a greater part of the social spectrum, as it were. So what did it mean socially to be a painter like Uccello living on the outer fringes of the Santa Maria Novella quarter in the mid-fifteenth century?

Since the research of the great archivist Gaetano Milanesi, published as annotations to his 1878 edition of Vasari’s Le vite, it has always been accepted that Uccello’s father was Dono di Paolo, a barber-surgeon from Pratovecchio, a small town east of Florence. Dono (short for Donato) gained his Florentine citizenship in 1373, and married one Antonia di Giovanni Castello del Beccuto in 1387. While Milanese was able to show that Uccello’s father had a coat of arms (a chevron between three lion heads), confirmed by a seventeenth-century description of the family’s tombstone previously in the cloister of Santo Spirito, south of the Arno, being the son of a migrant to Florence in the early fifteenth century could well have been a social disadvantage for Uccello. Since the fourteenth century, the conservative, oligarchic government of Florence generally discriminated against migrants, and made it difficult for them to hold public offices, the chief means of gaining high social status. Uccello’s mother’s family also had a coat of arms (a red field with a white band), but had a very long and respectable, even somewhat distinguished, history in Florence, putting Uccello in the awkward position of being both wellborn and slightly suspect, socially speaking. Compounding Uccello’s difficulty was the fact that his father died by the time Uccello wrote his first will in 1425, at the age of about 28, and it appears he had also been separated from what remained of his nuclear family, since he did not leave anything to family members in his will.

There is further evidence to suggest that Uccello was orphaned. When Uccello was away in Venice working on mosaics for the façade of San Marco in 1427, it fell to a distant relative from his mother’s family, Deo Beccuti, to submit his tax return. Deo described himself as Paolo’s attorney (‘p[r]ochuratore’), and stated that he submitted the return for a notary by the name of Ser Bartolo di Ser Donato Giannini. The death of a young person’s father in Renaissance Florence could call for the involvement of the Magistrato dei Pupilli, a communal institution providing judges and notaries to administer family property for orphans, who in turn dealt with orphans’ legal representatives: procuratores, curatores, and tutores. Uccello’s name has not been found in the Pupilli records, however, the facts that he left nothing to relatives in his will, and that his tax return was submitted by a distant relative while he was in Venice, suggest that he was without close family relations at this time. Ser Bartolo Giannini was Notary of the Signoria on a number of occasions from 1416 to 1438. It is not clear from the evidence whether he helped administer Uccello’s affairs following the death of his father, or merely requested that Deo Beccuti submit Uccello’s tax return while Uccello was away from Florence.

Deo was the most prominent member of Uccello’s mothers’ family at the time, and this may explain why he accepted the responsibility. Carocci identified Deo’s properties on his map, clustered around the Piazza di Santa Maria Maggiore, valuable real-estate near the centre of the city. It may have been because of the location of his mother’s ancestral home in this area that Uccello moved to the northwest part of the city by the age of about 28, and apart from professional trips out of the city, remained there for the rest of his life.

An unpublished, eighteenth-century genealogy of the del Beccuto family, compiled by a descendent, Anton Ranieri Orlandini, shows the male lineage of the most prominent branch of the family, including Deo, but does not make any reference to Uccello’s mother Antonia, or any woman born of the family for that matter. However, from her patronymic, ‘di Giovanni di Castello’, her grandfather’s name is known to be Castello, which was not a particularly common name in Florence. There is, however, one person with that name in the genealogy, Deo’s grandfather’s brother. Thus, Deo and Antonia may have been related through their grandfathers, which is supported by the age difference between Uccello and Deo. In 1427 Deo was 50, while Uccello was about 30, making Uccello approximately one generation younger than Deo. Castello di Lippo del Beccuto, tentatively identifiable in this way as Uccello’s great-grandfather, lived in the parish of Santa Maria Maggiore, as is indicated in a notarial record that also supports the assessment of Uccello’s relationship to Deo suggested here. It seems that when Castello died the tutelage of his sons Vanni and Antonio was assumed by his nephew Deo di Vanni, keeping the two lineages of the family closely bound, an arrangement sanctioned by the Pupilli. The name of one of Castello’s sons, Vanni—short for Giovanni¬, corresponds with Uccello’s grandfather’s name, known from his mother’s patronymic. This incidence of family solidarity provides a precedent for Deo di Deo del Beccuto’s later tutelage of Uccello.

Castello was a man of some social standing, whom the genealogy notes held the government office of prior in 1348, 1351, and 1355. Other archival evidence shows he helped the Signoria fortify the castello at Calenzano against Visconti attack in 1352. In turn, Castello’s great-grandfather was Geremia del Beccuto, who had been employed by the Signoria on works on the road outside the Baptistery in 1289. Thus, Uccello’s mother’s family had established a notable social status in Florence over many generations by the time of Uccello’s birth.

A large, carved pietra serena lintel, described by Carocci as a modern reproduction of a fifteenth-century original, was removed from the del Beccuto palace on the street of their name (Via del Beccuto), presumably at the time the building was demolished in the nineteenth century. The lintel is now housed in the Museo di San Marco in Florence, with hundreds of architectural fragments salvaged from the old centre of Florence. The lintel shows the family’s coat of arms in the centre, inside a wreath with two undulating ribbons flowing to each side. At each end of the lintel is the head of a fantastic, bird-like creature with plumes splayed out at the back and a giant beak, a witty allusion to their family name (becco means beak).

Also housed in the Museo di San Marco is a small mural painting of the Virgin and Child with an unusually expensive gold ground and lapis lazuli drapery. The credit for identifying this sadly damaged painting as a work of Uccello goes to the art historian Alessandro Parronchi, who realised that the inscription on the reverse of the work, ‘formerly in a house of the Del Beccuto [family]’ (‘già in una casa dei Del Beccuto’), and its elegant, gothic-inflected, Renaissance style indubitably linked the work to Uccello. Judging by the painting’s pointed-arch shape, it was originally located over a doorway, perhaps the same one the lintel came from. Together, the artefacts would have expressed symbolically the family’s piety, wealth, taste, and wit.

The del Beccuto had two, or possibly three, chapels in Santa Maria Maggiore. According to Vasari, the family had the chapel to the left of the main altar painted with scenes from the life of Saint John the Evangelist in 1383 by an obscure artist called Lippo, whose chapter in Le vite actually includes works by a number of artists, and nothing remains of the paintings that might help identify the individual responsible. A tomb of a member of the Beccuti family bearing the family’s coat of arms is still in the chapel; it is sometimes identified as belonging to Bruno Beccuti, presumably the Bruno del Beccuto who was a prior of the church. Other evidence shows Carnesecchi family patronage of the chapel: a tabernacle for the sacraments on the left wall of the chapel bears the date 1449 and the arms of the Carnesecchi, and Bernardo Carnesecchi’s tombstone, dated 1449, was recorded in the chapel in the eighteenth century. It is possible the del Beccuto and Carnesecchi families shared patronage rights to the chapel, or that patronage passed from one family to the other.

Deo Beccuti recorded that his father, Deo di Vanni, established a chapel dedicated to Saint Blaise in his testament notarised in 1386, without specifying its location within the church. However, the eighteenth-century antiquary, Giuseppe Richa, referred to a chapel founded in that year, third on the right from the entrance to the church, with a panel painting by the seventeenth-century artist Ottavio Vannini and his student Antonio Giusti, showing the martyrdom of Saint Blaise, with Saints Michael and John the Evangelist. An altarpiece that apparently stood in the chapel by 1423 is now lost. The chapel remained in the del Beccuto family until at least the seventeenth century. Further, Richa wrote that Deo di Vanni also had the patronage rights to the chapel to the right of the main altar, where he recorded an inscription declaring his foundation of the chapel in 1383 in language that left no doubt as to his own view of his high social standing: ‘SEP. NOBILIS VIRI DEI VANNIS DE BECCVDIS SPECTABILIS/ HONORABILIS QVI PRIMA DIE IVNII DOTAVIT AN. D. MCCCLXXXIII.’.

From sifting the fragmentary archival, artistic, and archaeological evidence, art historians such as Anna Padoa Rizzo and the present author have pieced together a picture of a long association between Uccello and Deo Beccuti, in which the patriarch of the artist’s mother’s family seems to have fostered the young man’s career in the absence of his father. Evidence of connections between Deo Beccuti and Uccello exists from the period Uccello was about 16 to about the age of about 36. Most importantly, Deo Beccuti had connections with Uccello’s earliest presumed patrons: the Confraternity of Saint Peter Martyr (it seems likely that Uccello worked in c. 1413 at their hospital at Castello just outside Florence, to which Beccuti had donated money for its renovation), the Bartoli family (in 1416 Uccello may have helped paint the street tabernacle near Castello belonging to this family with which Beccuti had financial dealings), and the Carnesecchi family (early sources state that Uccello helped paint the altarpiece, datable on current evidence to c. 1423, for a member of the family in Santa Maria Maggiore in Florence, the family from which Beccuti’s wife came), and as Padoa Rizzo suggested, Beccuti most likely commissioned the Virgin and Child now in the Museo di San Marco in the early 1430s.

Uccello’s 1458 tax return provides the first information about his wife and children. He named his wife, Tomasa di Benedetto Malifici, aged 25 (compared with his 62 years!), his six-year-old son Donato, and his daughter Antonia, who was just over a year old. Nothing is known about the social status of Uccello’s wife. At 200 florins, her dowry was neither particularly small nor large for a Florentine artist’s wife. The fact that she possessed a family name might suggest she came from a distinguished family, or one with pretensions. A little investigation of the tax records of the Florentine State Archive reveals that there were at least two Benedetto Malificis in Florence in 1427, one of who was potentially Uccello’s father-in-law. By coincidence, both of them were named Benedetto di Piero, while neither of them claimed to be particularly wealthy. One of them lived on Via della Scala, so Uccello might have met the family of his wife on the street where he lived. In the fifteenth century it was much more likely for an artisan or labourer to marry within their own gonfalone than for a member of the patriciate.

Uccello’s wife appears in the most famous of Vasari’s anecdotes concerning the artist, when one night she called him to bed he reportedly responded: ‘Oh what a sweet thing this perspective is!’ (‘Oh che dolce cosa è questa prospettiva!’). It is usually understood from this exchange that Uccello preferred to work on his perspective studies than sleep with his wife. Another interpretation, however, may be inferred from the words Vasari chose, no doubt carefully: that for Uccello the prospect of going to bed with his wife was a sweet thing (prospettiva meaning perspective and prospect). Both interpretations would have been intended more for the amusement of Vasari’s readers than their edification. Another of Vasari’s anecdotes concerning Uccello’s home relates that it was filled with the artist’s drawings of animals, which he kept there because he was too poor to afford real animals. It is, though, far from unusual for an artist to have drawings of animals at their disposal for the design of artworks. Ironically, Vasari admitted that he admired Uccello’s skill as a draughtsman, and that he was a collector of Uccello’s drawings, including a study of a beautifully foreshortened bull made for a painting then in the Medici Palace. Why, then, make Uccello (and Castagno, and other early Renaissance artists) the subject of disreputable anecdotes? Perhaps for no other reason than Vasari’s long series of artists’ lives would have made rather heavy-going reading if every artist was accorded the same reverential tone that he gave his favoured contemporaries, such as Michelangelo.

If the acquaintances Uccello made on his street might have lead to marriage, it seems they might also have lead to a commission for work. A mural painting by Uccello, datable on stylistic criteria after the late 1430s, was once found in the Spedale di Santa Maria della Scala (subsequently renamed San Martino alla Scala) on the same part of the street where Uccello lived. The hospital was founded in the early fourteenth century by a local benefactor, Cione di Lapo Pollini, and it took on the role of caring for abandoned children; by the fifteenth century its administration was taken over by the Silk Guild. The smallish mural painting of the Nativity (140 by 215 cm) was originally in the arch above the door leading from the cloister of the hospital into the foyer in front of its chapel. The painting has been detached from the wall, and is now stored with its sinopia (the underdrawing on the preparatory layer of plaster) in the reserve collection of the Uffizi, due to its poor state of preservation.

While no document concerning the work’s commission has been found, Annamaria Bernacchioni suggested that the commission might relate to the presence of the children’s Confraternity of the Archangel Raphael in the hospital. The confraternity moved into the chapel and rooms between the present-day Via degli Orti Oricellari and the courtyard by 1427, which they renovated at their own expense. It had prominent supporters, including Pope Eugenius IV, who approved an alternative name for it, in recognition of the impressive nativity play it performed in 1430: the Confraternity of the Nativity of Our Lord (perhaps helping to account for the subject of Uccello’s painting). He also issued bulls to obtain accommodation for the confraternity at the hospital, not far from the entrance to his apartment at Santa Maria Novella on Via della Scala. The confraternity might well have known the paintings Uccello executed in 1437 for the Confraternity of the Purification at the Spedale di San Matteo in the north of the city, since that confraternity was a splinter group that had separated from them in 1427. The groups maintained good relations after the split, visiting each other every year on the feast days of their patron saints. Thus, Uccello was a local artist whose work would have been familiar to those at the hospital.

The Nativity has been discussed by art historians as much for its sinopia, showing a regular perspectival grid, as for the composition of the final painting itself. Indeed, the sinopia is unique in the Renaissance in establishing only the perspective for the final composition, not the figures, architecture, or natural landscape features. The grid informs the finished painting’s unusual use of perspective, showing two sharply contrasting views: one of a Nativity scene taking place in front of a wooden shelter whose perspective is aligned to a point at the far right, and another view of the landscape with a pavement whose perspective is aligned to a point at the far left of the picture. Art historians have interpreted this experimentation with perspective as an instance of Uccello’s engagement with this key technical feature in the development of the visual arts in Florence in the fifteenth century.

Alessandro Parronchi interpreted the separate vanishing points as a critique of Brunelleschian and Albertian orthodox single-point perspective. He related this approach specifically to Vitellione’s observation in Book III of his Perspectiva that an object is only seen distinctly when it falls on the central axis between the viewer’s eyes. If this theoretical interpretation of Uccello’s imagery seems perhaps too erudite for a hospital for abandoned children housing a confraternity for children, it may be relevant that Brunelleschi (the reputed discoverer of single point perspective) had been one of the Operai (on the board of works) of the Silk Guild that administered the hospital, although his duties related to the construction of the Spedale degli Innocenti in the 1420s, well before Uccello’s work was painted at the Spedale di Santa Maria della Scala. Even so, there seems to be no definite imagery within the composition, such as blurred images at the lateral edges, to support Parronchi’s interpretation. Franco and Stefano Borsi interpreted the bi-focal perspective of the Nativity as an allusion to the duality of Christ’s incarnation, divine and human.

Alternatively, the divergence of the perspectival views towards the right and the left in Uccello’s Nativity, with the view to the right dominating, may have a moral and religious significance. The prominence of the sheep in the left foreground, near the point where the two perspective views separate, recalls the passage in the Bible in Matthew 25: 32–46 from Christ’s discourse on the Mount of Olives describing the separation of the sheep from the goats:

And before him shall be gathered all the nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats:

And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.

Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:

For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:

Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison and ye came unto me.

Then shall the righteous answer him, saying Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?

When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?

Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?

And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

Then shall he say unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:

For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:

I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.

Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?

Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.

And these shall go away into everlasting punishment; but the righteous into life eternal.

Part of the same text (the latter part of Matthew 25: 34) provides a central inscription in the fourteenth-century mural painting Allegory of Mercy in the Sala dell’Udienza of the Misericordia in the Piazza di San Giovanni in Florence, one of the most important charitable institutions in Florence in the late Medieval and early Renaissance period. Like the Spedale di Santa Maria della Scala, it cared for foundlings, among its other charitable activities. The Allegory of Mercy has been described as the earliest instance of the representation of the works of mercy in an Italian philanthropic institution, and as such the model for a number of mural painting cycles of similar subject matter in Tuscany, some of them in hospitals. The best-known Tuscan depiction of the seven acts of mercy (the six acts referred to in Matthew plus the burying of the dead added by the Catholic Church) is the glazed terracotta relief frieze, mostly by Santi Buglioni, on the façade of the Ceppo Hospital at Pistoia, dating from the 1520s.

The separation of the sheep and goats seems rarely to have been depicted in art literally. A relief of the subject is found on a fourth-century Italian marble sarcophagus lid in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. An important example is found among the sixth-century mosaics in the church of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna. If the iconography of Uccello’s Nativity does relate to the parable of the sheep and the goats, it could be interpreted as an allusion to the charitable work undertaken at the hospital, especially for children. While the children might be reassured that they will be cared for at the hospital by the image of the Virgin adoring the Christ Child, or (metaphorically) by the image of the shepherds watching over their flocks, the administrators of the hospital could be assured (allegorically) that ultimately their charitable work would be rewarded by Christ.

The Nativity may also hint at the punishment Christ alluded to for those who did not act mercifully. While the dominant view of the Christian story of the Nativity leads to the vanishing point on the right (traditionally the virtuous side and in the painting it is also on Christ’s right), the subsidiary one leads to a tiny gallows in the distant landscape at the left (traditionally the ‘sinister’ side). That the motif of the gallows might not just be an insignificant landscape feature, but a symbol, is suggested by the figure of Securitas in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Effects of Good and Bad Government in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, whose attribute is a man hanging from a gallows. The iconography of the Nativity apparently represents two paths: the Christian path leading to eternal life on the right, and another leading to ignominy on the left, a moral message on the rewards for charity and the danger of straying from the Christian path.

The Nativity is not an isolated instance of neighbourhood patronage. Some of Uccello’s most famous mural paintings are to be found in the Chiostro Verde (‘Green Cloister’) of the ex-convent of Santa Maria Novella, around the corner from where he lived. Elsewhere, the present author has argued that the commission for the Stories of Genesis mural painting cycle on three walls of the cloister probably relates to the presence of the Confraternity of Saint Peter Martyr at the convent, and that Uccello’s involvement with the project may have come about partly through his and his relative Deo Beccuti’s dealings with the confraternity.

If Uccello’s route is retraced in a hypothetical journey made in the late 1450s from his home to the Cathedral, much as was done for Brunelleschi, the topographical landmarks that would have stood out as spaces of particular significance for him can be identified. Walking down Via della Scala he would have passed the hospital from which the street took its name, where he painted the Nativity. He might have heard the voices of the orphaned children his painting overlooked in the cloister, and given thought to the difficulties he had faced as a young man in Florence without a father. His own family history demonstrates how Florentine families and the city’s government were concerned with protecting the young in a time of high mortality, and perhaps Uccello’s Nativity itself alludes to this.

At the end of the street he would have entered the Piazza di Santa Maria Novella where the magnificent church and convent rise, near which he had lived in his twenties, and for which he later painted scenes from Genesis in its cloister. Seeing work commencing on the spectacular white marble façade of the church he might well have recalled that the patron, Giovanni Rucellai, who lived only a few blocks away on the south side of the piazza, was also an owner of his work. Crossing into the present-day Via dei Banchi on the other side of the piazza he would have come to the intersection known as the Canto dei Carnesecchi where Domenico Veneziano painted the tabernacle that allegedly inspired Castagno’s envy, most probably for one of the Carnesecchi, a leading family in the area. As modern commentators have done, Uccello might have noted how its robust use of perspective and pure geometric forms was influenced by his own works in that vein.

Following the Via de’ Cerretani, Uccello would have passed on his right the houses of his wealthy relative Deo Beccuti, surrounding the small Piazza di Santa Maria Maggiore, even perhaps glimpsing above their door the Virgin and Child he painted for his mother’s family. Inside the church, sixteenth-century sources inform us he painted an Annunciation impressive for its pioneering use of perspective. The altarpiece to which it belonged was commissioned by Paolo di Berto Carnesecchi, from the family into which Deo Beccuti had married, making Uccello a very distant relation of his patron. To square the circle, as it were (constituting Uccello, Deo Beccuti, Paolo Carnesecchi, and Filippo Brunelleschi) Paolo di Berto Carnesecchi would have known Brunelleschi from their time together as representatives of the Gonfalone Dragon on the government Consiglio del Popolo in 1400. Brunelleschi’s house was located in the small block south of Deo Beccuti’s properties, and Uccello would have given some thought to the technical innovations of this most famous artist and architect, as even a fifteenth-century source suggests. From such a social context it is not very far to the upper echelons of Florentine society. Deo Beccuti also owned property in the parish of San Lorenzo, the heartland of the Medici, located a little further up Via de’ Cerretani and a small block to the north. Moreover, he was a neighbouring landlord of Cosimo de’ Medici in Calenzano, and had financial dealings with Averardo de’ Medici.

Coming to the Baptistery in a matter of minutes, Uccello might have recalled how one of his distant ancestors had worked there, how he himself had been commissioned to paint a tabernacle for it in the early 1450s (which if it was completed is lost), and how his son and daughter were baptised there. Uccello might then have stepped into his workshop situated on the piazza to examine the small paintings of the Virgin and Child that were probably being produced by an assistant to his designs in this period. Then entering the soaring space of the Cathedral he could not have failed to see his enormous mural painting of the Equestrian Monument for Sir John Hawkwood on the wall of the left aisle, and on the inner façade, the enormous Clockface with Four Male Heads (Evangelists?). At this point Uccello might have recalled his dealings over many years with the rich and powerful Operai of the Wool Guild. Finally, approaching Brunelleschi’s cupola, he would have seen far above his head the three large stained glass windows he designed for its drum: the Annunciation, Nativity, and Resurrection.

Dr Hugh Hudson, Honorary Fellow, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne.

Un problema di collaborazione tra Paolo Uccello , Masolino e Masaccio : http://www.carnesecchi.eu/maggiore23.doc

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