Uccello's 'Rout of San Romano'
R.V. Wells provides historical context for a famous Renaissance battle scene.
Paolo Uccello's 'Rout of San Romano' is one of the best known and most popular of the Italian paintings in the National Gallery in London. Originally it was one of a set of three panels that hung in the private apartments of Lorenzo il Magnifico in the Medici-Riccardi palace in Florence. In 1787 it was offered for sale, along with the panel now in the Louvre in Paris. The third one of the set remained in Florence, and is now in the Uffizi Gallery. The National Gallery acquired the London panel in 1857, but it was not until 1901 that the subject, and the identity of the principal figure in it, was established beyond doubt by the collector and art critic Herbert Percy Horne.
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