The Stones of Florence by Mary McCarthy Page B

the seat of the fierce Guidi family high in the Casentino, and was called Uccello, Vasari says, which means ‘bird’, because of the birds and beasts that abounded in his paintings. Vasari describes him as ‘a shy man ... solitary, strange, melancholy, and poor’. His house was ‘always full of painted representations of birds, cats, dogs, and every sort of strange animal of which he could get drawings, as he was too poor to have the living creatures themselves’. His scientific studies, it was thought, had unhinged him. When he was engrossed in some difficult or impossible question of perspective, he would shut himself up for weeks and months in his house, not letting himself be seen. One of his few friends was the mathematician Manetti, with whom he liked to discuss Euclid. His other friend, Donatello, told him he was wasting his time making drawings of mazzocchi (tyres made of wood or straw, worn by men of the quattrocento as a sort of scaffolding for a cloth head-dress) with projecting points and bosses, and spheres with seventy-two facets, all shown in perspective, from different angles. ‘Such things,’ said Donatello, ‘are only useful for workers in intarsia.’ In his old age, Uccello, too crankish to get commissions, became utterly destitute and had to apply to the state for tax relief. ‘I am old and without means of livelihood,’ he wrote on his tax return. ‘My wife is sick and I am unable to work any more.’
    The perspective lessons of Brunelleschi, which had inspired Masaccio to create figures and scenes of monumental majesty, larger than life and stiller, were taken to heart by Uccello in a quite different way. For him, perspective opened up vistas of haunted fantasy, and the vanishing point figured as the ‘eye’ of a storm or the centre of a whirlpool, in which forms were tossed about, pulled by hidden currents obeying mathematical laws. Two scientific strains oddly combine in Uccello, one mathematical, the other descriptive and classificatory. He was one of those solitary artists who delight in the minute particulars of botany and zoology, and for him the human parade appeared, as if under a magnifying glass, as a collection of specimens, comparable to the specimens of botany—leaves and flowers and grasses—or to those zoological curiosities that were collected in Books of Beasts.
    A freak of Nature or ‘rare bird’ himself, he was drawn to the whimsicalities and aberrations of the natural world, which comprised man in its scope; the armour of a mounted knight appeared to him in the same light as the hard shell of an insect, and the plumes of a helmet like the waving tail or combed forelock of a horse. He seems to have been hypnotized by headgear, particularly by the mazzocchi. Curious shapes and outlines caught his attention, and he was fond of showing the human face in profile, with a hard bright eye like the alert eye of a bird. He was ‘simple’, says Vasari, and tells the story of how he produced a camel when a chameleon had been ordered, having been misled by the similarity of names. Bright ribbon attracted him, like a magpie, and one of his most charming works is simply a rosette of pleated ribbon in clear green, blue, and white, done in mosaic on a vault of St Mark’s atrium in Venice. The marvellous precision with which it is made, in perspective, like a dazzling coloured snow crystal overhead, creates a strange, joyous impression, as though the Florentine Renaissance, that glorious Nativity, had been announced to the backward oriental city in the epiphany of a star in the sky.
    The series of long panels called ‘The Rout of San Romano’, which used to be framed together as a single extended scene in the bedroom of Lorenzo de’ Medici, in Cosimo’s palace on Via Cavour, and which is now divided—one part being in the Uffizi, one in the National Gallery of London, and one in the Louvre—has often been compared to a child’s fantasy of a chivalric battle, in which the