Battle of San Romano

This is the central panel of the three-part Battle of San Romano (its companions are in Paris and London), showing the Florentine commander Niccolo da Tolentino, in a great gold-and-scarlet hat, charging on a rearing white horse. Once again Paolo Uccello turns a cavalry clash into a geometry lesson: lances and a fallen knight lie along the receding lines of the pink field like a perspective diagram, and the horses look as turned and tooled as carousel figures. Painted for the Medici palace to celebrate a 1432 victory over Siena, the set is at once decorative heraldry and one of the strangest, most rigorously experimental visions of the early Renaissance.