The Crucifixion
Paolo Uccello·1455
Historical Context
Paolo Uccello's Crucifixion, painted around 1455 for the Metropolitan Museum, belongs to his late career when his experimental approach to perspective and form had become increasingly abstract. This devotional panel reflects the tension in Uccello's art between the demands of sacred subject matter and his formal obsessions. 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.
Technical Analysis
The Crucifixion displays Uccello's late style, with the figures rendered in his characteristically geometric manner, the cross and figures creating a pattern of angular forms that subordinates narrative emotion to formal structure.
