Painting of Jacopone da Todi

Paolo Uccello's portrait of Jacopone da Todi, the thirteenth-century Franciscan mystic and lauda poet, is exceptional within Uccello's body of work — he is overwhelmingly known for battle scenes and perspective experiments rather than devotional portraits. The commission most likely came from a Franciscan house in Tuscany, where Jacopone's vernacular religious poetry was revered as part of the order's spiritual heritage. Uccello probably executed this in his later career when perspective had become second nature and he was applying his spatial intelligence more freely to figurative formats.

The portrait is executed on panel and frames the friar against a plain ground with the restrained linearity Uccello carried from his goldsmith training under Ghiberti. The habit's brown folds are rendered with the same analytical interest in volume that characterises his more famous battle scenes.