Madonna Martello

Paolo Uccello's Madonna Martello, painted around 1420, belongs to the traditional type of the enthroned Madonna and Child that was the foundation of Italian devotional painting. The name derives from a former owner, and the painting represents Uccello's engagement with this conventional subject early in his experimental career. Paolo Uccello was among the most theoretically ambitious painters of fifteenth-century Florence, whose fascination with perspective led him to develop extraordinarily complex spatial constructions that astonished his contemporaries.

The Madonna and Child are rendered with the blend of decorative pattern and emerging spatial awareness that characterizes Uccello's early style, with the throne and figures showing the first signs of his distinctive geometric approach.