Uccello, Paolo

Uccello, Paolo, real name Paolo Di Dono (c. 1397-1475), Italian Renaissance painter, notable for innovations in the use of foreshortening and linear perspective. He was born in Florence and apprenticed at an early age to the Florentine artist Lorenzo Ghiberti. In 1425 he went to Venice to design mosaics for the façade of St Mark's. He returned to Florence and in 1436 painted a fresco of the English soldier of fortune Sir John Hawkwood for Florence Cathedral. About 1444 he executed a series of stained-glass windows for the cathedral, of which one, depicting the Resurrection, is still in place. Fragments also remain of frescoes Uccello painted about 1447 in the cloisters of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, depicting the Creation and the Flood.

Few of Uccello's paintings are extant. The most famous are three versions of the Battle of San Romano (Uffizi, Florence; Louvre, Paris; and National Gallery, London), made in the late 1440s. Another major work is The Hunt (1468, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford). These works show the painter's sophisticated handling of scientific perspective and his sense of decorative pattern.