The Battle of San Romano

Subtract piece by piece. The fallen soldier in the London panel, laid with his head toward the vanishing point along a line of recession, cannot go: he is the battle and the system at once, a death drawn as a demonstration. The broken lances strewn on the ground are the floor grid made of war; remove them and the space loses its measure. The rearing and falling horses, the raised lances that close the upper field like a fence, the commander’s red and gold headdress at the centre: each holds a station. What yields is the edge. The hills behind, with their hares, hounds and small running figures, are permitted more than compelled; the hedges are as much a tapestry convention as a necessity; and the Louvre panel restates the London panel’s means. Necessary at the core, assembled at the margins.

Score: 8.0 / 10

What can be stated is that a battle remembered by a city becomes a pageant. The violence is real, a man dead, horses down, a commander thrown, but it is held in a geometry so total that no one bleeds and nothing moves. The panels disclose how civic memory turns war into ornament for a private room, and how a new science of seeing, applied to chaos, freezes it into a diagram of itself. That is a meaning, and it holds beyond Florence: the order imposed on violence is the looker’s, not the fight’s. But it is disclosed obliquely, as a strangeness the viewer must put into words, and the panels do not uncover the condition of the soldier, of the peasant behind the hedge or of the city that paid. Mood still carries more of the weight than meaning.

Score: 7.7 / 10

The elevation is cold and decorative, and it recurs. The first height is the field of lances against the dark: in the London and Louvre panels the upright and couched shafts make a rhythm like a choir, and the eye is lifted by pattern before it reads the fight. The second is the white horse at the centre of the Uffizi panel, rearing out of a dark mass, with the unhorsed rider falling: the one moment of real drama. The third is the strangeness itself, armoured men as faceted solids, horses as carved toys, a landscape tilted like a hanging, under a stillness like a dream. At full size the effect comes close to grandeur. It is not terror and not tragic height: beauty and enchantment, sustained across all three panels, high in kind and limited in range.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Mostly evoked. The commander at the head of his troops, baton raised, on a white horse, summons the chivalric triumph and the tournament; the unhorsing is the oldest event of the lists, and the pageant echoes the romance world that Florentine households hung on their walls and painted on their chests. The orange trees evoke the garden, and have been read as a Medici emblem, a reading that is disputed. What is built is one structure: war as a ritual of order, a contest in which death is laid out in the same lines as the ground. That is more a vision than an archetype. The particulars stay particular, a named condottiere, a named enemy, a named day, and they take on the air of legend, but the archetypal structure does not bear the load. Evoked well, built thinly.

Score: 7.5 / 10

The inheritance is the International Gothic battle and tournament picture, the painted chest, the tapestry of chivalric scenes, the decorative world of Gentile da Fabriano; and, from the other side, the new perspective of Brunelleschi and the treatise Alberti had just written. The turn is to throw the second at the first: to take a secular, contemporary skirmish, enlarge it to monumental scale on panel for a private house, and build it as a perspectival construction in which the debris of battle becomes the measuring grid. The stake was real. The result is visibly strange, toylike and stiff by the standards of either tradition, and the charge of eccentricity followed the painter. Against it, the commission was decorative and private, and ornament protected the departure. A large turn at a moderate cost.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Change the form and what the work knows changes. Its knowledge is the clash of two orders, the geometric order of perspective and the disorder of a fight, and that clash exists only in the construction: the lances laid on the lines of recession, the fallen man foreshortened as a solid, the horses reduced to rounded volumes, the armour faceted like the mazzocchio studies the painter is known for. In prose a battle would be a battle; here it is a battle made to sit still for its measurement, and the stillness is the meaning. The three long fields add the frieze, so that time is laid out in space as in a chronicle. What holds the axis below the top is that the spatial system does not run through the whole field: the hills are built on another plan.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The evidence of return is strong and specific. The panels have sustained argument for more than a century: on their order, on their dating, the late 1430s against the mid 1450s, on their first owner, on their original shape and setting, and on their technique, where the National Gallery’s technical study of the London panel is a standard text on tempera and metal leaf. Beyond the scholarship they keep yielding to looking: each return finds another construction, the lances that read as orthogonals, the horse’s rump as a sphere, the small hunts in the hills, and another tension between pageant and death. Painters and writers of the twentieth century came back to them for their geometry and their dreamlike stillness. Against this, much of the yield is formal; the meanings are fewer than the problems. The well is deep in one direction.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Intrinsic force is high. The panels are among the first large demonstrations of what linear perspective could do to a secular narrative subject, and they set the problem of the modern battle picture, how to order a melee, which Piero della Francesca’s battle scenes at Arezzo and, far more forcefully, Leonardo’s design for the Battle of Anghiari took up in other terms. Reach in their own field and decade was limited: they hung in a private room, and Florentine painting followed Masaccio, Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi rather than Uccello, whose manner was admired as a curiosity. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the delayed reach, real and discounted, is the twentieth century’s, among painters and critics drawn to geometric form and the uncanny, and in writers such as Marcel Schwob and Antonin Artaud, who made Uccello a figure; it reaches the artist’s image more than any work these panels redirected.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over about 585 years. The form is legible in all three panels: the composition, the construction and the figures stand. Presence is continuous, in three great public collections and in wide reproduction. The charges, in order of weight: the silver leaf on the armour has tarnished nearly to black over most of its area, so the work’s key effect of bright metal against colour is largely lost and the armies read darker and heavier than they were painted; the gold survives better. That loss is more than fabric, since it takes part of the image. And the three are divided among three cities and three countries, so the work as a unit is not seen together. Whether the panels’ shape was altered for a later setting is argued and not charged as certain.

Score: 8.9 / 10

The command of the medium is great and particular. The perspective construction of the London panel is exact where it chooses to be: the lances and the fallen body are laid on the system, and the horses are built as solids from studies of volume. The tempera is handled with a decorator’s finish across very large surfaces; the patterning of the damask headdress, the harness and the orange hedge, and the gilding and silvering, now dimmed, show complete control of a costly technique. The design of the three long fields, with their massing of dark and light and the rhythm of shafts, is assured. Against the top band, the drawing of horses and men is stiff, and some of it is limit rather than choice: the horses’ anatomy, the scale between foreground and background figures, the faces. The craft is load-bearing in the system and uneven in the figure.

Score: 8.7 / 10

One law, geometric order imposed on tumult, governs the foreground of all three panels: armour as faceted solid, horse as sphere and cylinder, lance as line, death as orthogonal. Take the two most distant elements, the foreground stage and the background hills. The hills are built on a different plan, steeply tilted and dotted with small hunts and running figures, closer to the tapestry and the Gothic landscape than to the measured box. One can read this as law, a near stage of measured space against a far world of pattern, which is the opposition the work is about, and that reading is credited in part. But it is also simply a gap: the perspective stops at the hedge. Across the three panels the law holds, the same armies, the same palette of reds, golds and blackened silver, the same frieze: wide range in subject, a single manner, one real seam.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The orders held: the state and its war, a victory made civic memory; the individual, in named condottieri commanding or falling; death, in the fallen man and the downed horses; the natural order, in orange trees, roses, hills, hares and hounds; labour and the countryside, slightly, in the small figures behind; and the private household, which the work implies by its form as the furnishing of a room. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent. The sacred is almost missing, and so is the inner life: no face carries consciousness. History is held as pageant, not as cause or cost. And the orders are present more than integrated: the hunting countryside sits behind the fight rather than with it. For three panels nearly ten metres long the reach is moderate, above a cabinet picture and well below a narrative cycle or a work that holds the sacred and the state together.

Score: 7.4 / 10