Paolo Uccello's 'The Battle of San Romano'

This is an audio description of 'The Battle of San Romano', by the Italian artist Paulo Uccello, painted between 1438 and 1440. The picture is nearly 2 metres high and over 3 metres wide, in a wooden frame. It is painted in egg tempera, which is paint made from coloured pigments binded with egg yolk.

The painting depicts a battle in the Italian countryside, backed by distant rolling hills. It is a busy scene with many figures on horseback. But rather than the chaotic reality of a bloody conflict, Uccello has shown a triumphal, courtly scene which would have once sparkled with decorative touches of silver leaf and brilliant colours, now faded with time. Some of the elements are almost like cut-outs, the horses and riders with a somewhat flat appearance.

The painting commemorates an important battle in Florence’s war against Lucca and her allies Milan and Siena, that took place in the summer of 1432. Heralded on by a row of mounted trumpeters on the far left of the painting, a dozen Florentine soldiers on black and grey horses, charge across the scene. Holding up lances, they wear dark armour and helmets adorned with ostrich feathers and dragon wings - too impractical to have actually been worn in battle. Their prancing horses seem to have hopped off a carousel rather than out of a stable.

It is not clear who is attacking whom, but a soldier on the far right, on a white horse, faces the charge and fights off three others. He is wielding a horseman’s pick - used to pierce armour and hook men off their mounts. He represents the routed forces of the Italien State of Sienna.

Brightly lit in the centre, thrusting forth a commander’s baton in his right hand, Niccolò da Tolentino, leads the Florentine troops. He is astride a white rearing horse and wears a magnificent ‘mazzocchio,’ a large hexagonal shaped hat made of red and gold velvet. He has a matching cloak. These were gifts, actually awarded to him after the battle, in honour of his victory. His white heraldic flag flutters in the breeze above him, decorated with his family emblem – the ‘Solomon’s knot’ , a ring of rope with tassels knotted at North, South, East and West. However, most of the flag is cut off by the top of the painting. Niccolò da Tolentino is one of only a few figures in the melee whose face is uncovered – the other soldiers have their visors down. His helmet is carried by his fair-haired page, who rides behind him, wearing the same red and gold colours.

Behind the soldiers is a tall hedgerow of greenery dotted with pink and white roses, clusters of bright oranges and a few pomegranates. All three add colour and decoration, but also have a symbolic meaning, the rose a Christian symbol for martyrdom, the orange as a fruit of paradise, while the pomegranate represented rebirth.

Beyond the bushes, on the rolling hills of farmland, are the small figures of a dozen scattered foot-soldiers, as well as a pair of cavalrymen.

Uccello was an enthusiastic experimenter with the laws of mathematical perspective. Each broken lance dropped in the battle is arranged in a grid-like pattern on the pink earthen floor. They form diagonal lines that recede into space towards an invisible vanishing point. Even a dead soldier, face down on the floor, falls into line along this perspectival grid.

The painting was one of three designed to hang in the Palace of Leonardo Salimbeni, the head of a wealthy family who had moved to Florence from Siena. Keen to show loyalty to his new home city, he commissioned Uccello to commemorate the battle. The paintings communicated Florence’s power so effectively that after Salimbeni’s death, they were forcibly seized by Lorenzo de’ Medici, who had the arched tops of the paintings cut down and squared off to hang in his own palace!