保罗·乌切洛

生平

记载乌切洛生平的文献非常少，仅有一些他同时代的官方文件和在他死后75年瓦萨里写的《艺苑名人传》。由于文献的缺少，我们甚至不能确切的知道他的出生日期。一般认为他1397年在普拉托韦基奥出生。他在税务申报表上也表明他是1397年出生的，但1446年后他又说他是1396年出生。他爸爸多纳·迪·保罗是当地的理发师兼外科医生，他妈妈安东尼娅是弗洛伦撒的大户人家。他被称为“乌切洛”，是因为他喜欢画鸟，“乌切洛”在意大利语就是鸟的意思。

Paolo Uccello ( oo-CHEL-oh, Italian: [ˈpaːolo utˈtʃɛllo]; 1397 – 10 December 1475), born Paolo di Dono, was an Italian Renaissance painter and mathematician from Florence who was notable for his pioneering work on visual perspective in art. In his book Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Giorgio Vasari wrote that Uccello was obsessed by his interest in perspective and would stay up all night in his study trying to grasp the exact vanishing point. Uccello used perspective to create a feeling of depth in his paintings. His best known works are the three paintings representing the battle of San Romano, which were wrongly entitled the Battle of Sant'Egidio of 1416 for a long period of time.

Paolo worked in the Late Gothic tradition, emphasizing colour and pageantry rather than the classical realism that other artists were pioneering. His style is best described as idiosyncratic, and he left no school of followers. He has had some influence on twentieth-century art and literary criticism (e.g., in the Vies imaginaires by Marcel Schwob, Uccello le poil by Antonin Artaud and O Mundo Como Ideia by Bruno Tolentino).

Early life and training

The sources for Paolo Uccello's life are few: Giorgio Vasari's biography, written 75 years after Paolo's death, and a few contemporary official documents. Uccello probably was born in 1397 in Pratovecchio (near Arezzo), the hometown of his father, Dono di Paolo, a barber-surgeon. His mother, Antonia, was a high-born Florentine. His nickname Uccello ("little bird") came from his fondness for painting birds.

From 1412 until 1416 he was apprenticed to the famous sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti.……

Career

According to Vasari, Uccello's first painting was a Saint Anthony between the saints Cosmas and Damianus, a commission for the hospital of Lelmo. Next, he painted two figures in the convent of Annalena. Shortly afterwards, he painted three frescoes with scenes from the life of Saint Francis above the left door of the Santa Trinita church. For the Santa Maria Maggiore church, he painted a fresco of the Annunciation. In this fresco, he painted a large building with columns in perspective.……

Battle of San Romano paintings

Around the mid-1450s, he painted his three most famous paintings, the panels depicting the Battle of San Romano for the Palazzo Medici in Florence, commemorating the victory of the Florentine army over the Sienese in 1432. The extraordinarily foreshortened forms extending in many planes accentuate Uccello's virtuosity as a draftsman, and provides a controlled visual structure to the chaos of the battle scene.

Later life

By 1453, Uccello was married to Tommasa Malifici. This is known because in that year Donato (named after Donatello), was born. Three years later, in 1456, his wife gave birth to their daughter, Antonia. Antonia Uccello (1456–1491) was a Carmelite nun, whom Giorgio Vasari called "a daughter who knew how to draw." She was even noted as a "pittoressa", a painter, on her death certificate. Her style and her skill remains a mystery as none of her work is extant.

From 1465 to 1469, Uccello was in Urbino with his son Donato working for the Confraternity of Corpus Domini, a brotherhood of laymen.……

Works

Pope-Hennessy is far more conservative than the Italian authors: he attributes some of the works below to a "Prato Master" and a "Karlsruhe Master". Most of the dates in the list (taken from Borsi and Borsi) are derived from stylistic comparison rather than from documentation.

• Annunciation (c. 1420–1425) - Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
• Crucifixion with Two Angels (c. 1423) - Private collection

Creation and Fall (c.1424–1425) - Lunette and lower section, Chiostro Verde, Santa Maria Novella, Florence

Adoration of the Magi (c. 1431–1432) - Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe