Madonna and Child

Paolo Uccello's Madonna and Child, painted around 1445 for the National Gallery of Ireland, is one of his rare devotional works that demonstrates how even his Madonnas bear the stamp of his distinctive geometric approach. The devotional panel format required Uccello to temper his experimental tendencies with conventional piety. 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 Uccello's characteristic geometric simplification, the faces modeled as spherical volumes and the drapery arranged in patterns that reveal his underlying interest in abstract form.