The Mathematical Artist

Funerary monument to Sir John
Hawkwood, 1436, photo courtesy
of Wikipedia Creative Commons

            A most interesting biography in Giorgio Vasari’s The Lives of Artists, the life of Paolo Uccello, recounts a somewhat downtrodden life for the artist.  Vasari writes at length about what he calls Uccello’s preoccupation with perspective, who spent less time on his figures, which often come out stiff.  He admires Uccello’s talent, but writes that “anyone who does violence to his nature with fanatical study may well sharpen one corner of his mind, but nothing that he creates will ever appear to have been done with the nature ease and grace of those who place each brush-stroke in its proper place”.  According to Vasari, Uccello lived a rather impoverished and lonely life, locking himself in his home due to his own embarrassment and lack of praise.

Uccello's Mazzochio drawing, photo courtesy of
Wikipedia Creative Commons

            Though Paolo Uccello was perhaps distracted with the mathematical perfection of his art, it allowed for a great improvement in the techniques of perspective – a fact which presents itself in his artwork.  Mazzochios, a wicker headdress fashionable for men in his day, are found in many of Uccello’s paintings.  While many artists would focus on the humanity and realism within an artwork, Uccello did extensive drawings on these mazzochios, striving to understand their structural complexity and perspective.

Vasari's fresco for the Earth element in
Palazzo Vecchio, photo by Tessa B.

        Uccello also often employed the terra verde (generally, earth toned) style of painting in many of his pieces.  This sometimes frustrates Vasari, who states that it is an error “because things that appear to be made from stone cannot and should not be tinted with another color”.  In other words, Uccello often painted buildings or nature in unnatural colors, a practice that Vasari does not quite understand.

            In all, Vasari seems to have admired Uccello for his talents.  Interestingly enough, it seems he borrowed an idea from Uccello’s frescos in the Peruzzi home for one of the rooms commissioned by Duke Ferdinand in the Palazzo Vecchio: the four elements painted with animals representing them, a mole for the earth, a fish for water, a salamander for fire, and a chameleon for air.