The Resurrection

Paolo Uccello's Resurrection, painted around 1443 for the Florence Cathedral, depicts Christ rising from the tomb in a composition that demonstrates the artist's distinctive approach to sacred narrative. The Resurrection allowed Uccello to explore dramatic spatial effects and the foreshortening of figures that were his lifelong preoccupation. 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 composition contrasts the upright risen Christ with the sprawling sleeping soldiers below, their armored forms providing Uccello with the opportunity to demonstrate his mastery of foreshortened geometric volumes.