Niccolò Mauruzi da Tolentino at the Battle of San Romano

The National Gallery's panel of the Battle of San Romano by Paolo Uccello depicts Niccolò da Tolentino leading the Florentine forces, the opening engagement of the 1432 battle. The three paintings were originally commissioned for the Bartolini Salimbeni palace before being seized by Lorenzo de' Medici for his own collection. 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 panel displays Uccello's systematic application of linear perspective to a complex battle scene, with the massed cavalry and fallen warriors organized into a decorative pattern of interlocking geometric forms.