Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
(piano playing)
Dr. Steven Zucker: Niccolo da Tolentino
the Florentine commander rises up
on his charger.
He wears no helmet.
This is a painting about the Florentine victory
over the Sienese that was part of a broader conflict
with the city of Lucca.
Dr. Beth Harris: And, of course, the Italian
city states were always at war with one another
and this painting of the Battle of San Romano
is actually one of three panels of this subject
that were meant as a set.
One of the others is in Uffizi
and the other is in the Louvre in Paris.
Dr. Zucker: And they're large paintings,
so you really feel as if the battle is in front of you.
Dr. Harris: So, imagine the three together
and they were all together in the Medici Palace.
These paintings were a favorite of Lorenzo de'Medici
who actually had them forceably removed
from the home of the family that had
commissioned them in Florence and brought
to the Medici Palace, which you could do
if you were Lorenzo de'Medici,
basically the ruler of Florence.
It is the scene of a battle, but the painting
to me, it's about two competing elements
of painting in Florence in the first half
of the 15th Century.
Dr. Zucker: Paolo Uccello, the artist,
was very much a product of international Gothic
of this late strain of Gothic style
that really emphasized pattern and the decorative.
On the other hand, he also lived in Florence
when Berlesci lived there and had
developed the near perspective.
This radically modern approach to representing
space in painting and so you have a painting
that is about another kind of conflict.
I think that is exactly right, the conflict between
the idea of surface decoration and the ability
to render deep space.
Dr. Harris: So, you have many, many decorative
elements here that are in line with that
international Gothic style from the pattern
on the commanders fabulous turban, the gold decorations
that we see on the bridles and the saddles
of the horses or even those decorative curving shapes
of the armor.
At the same time, we have a mathematical illusion
of space created with linear perspective
being applied in the oddest way with the orthogonals
created by the lances that have fallen to the ground.
Dr. Zucker: So, on the one hand,
all that decorative metal work, for instance,
in the bridles really pushes up against
the surface of the painting and denies depth.
On the other hand, you have exactly the opposite thing
happening with all of the debris of the battle
that's fallen below the horses.
Look at the way those fragments of lances,
for instance, create almost a kind of chess board.
Dr. Harris: And that conflicts also
with the background where we see vegetation.
That create a flat tapestry like pattern behind them
that also denies an illusion into space.
Dr. Zucker: Look at the specific information
that the artist has given us.
Look at the bridle gear or even the straps
at the back of the armor.
One of my favorite areas, is if you look
in the background and you look at some
of the smaller figures that play against
that monochromatic field, you can see
archers with crossbows who are reloading
their weapons by pulling on them at their feet.
Dr. Harris: So, these two tendencies that we see
in Florentine painting of the decorative
and the scientific, come together in
Uccello's Battle of San Romano.
(piano playing)