I I Y I
VASAHI AM) TUX QUIXOTIC I'AINTEB
t .r m now descend Krotil f lie sublime heights of Dante's paradise to duhuji ulous—to the punitory nf art history, in which we encounter one ..i rlu- mou delightful of all artists. I speak of Paolo Ucceiln. We .ill know i.....      I te's the lovable fifteenth-century Florentine painted who pictured
I 'hi: Hawkwood, "ili.it ghostly chessman," .is Mary McCarthy called him, m die il.uk Cothtc catlu-dral ol Florence. He is also the- designer of three equally famous paintings of the Battle of S.m komunu, rhivatrň n nuances ni which brightly colored toy soldier* or equestrian puppets ■ Úplný iheir nchly patterned lances in. "fall places, an orange bower, going to war in a garden
Uccello has .ilv. iys v. htm. i his in igli in v. eirJ w ay- Ai ■ hilc ( ioik\ jfcMH large photographs of the San Rom a no battle painTJngs tacked to Ins midio wall, and sec can almosi see tlic complex. mnltifaceted tonus of i lie Florentine's highly intricate an dissolving into the evocative, still surreal abstractions that fliiat in the dream world of the Modernist's canvases, halo Calvino, who loved the romance of Ariosto and who even invented a "nonexistent knight," imagined the armor of Uceellos horsemen momentarily voided of human presences, filled with birds, next transformed mto crustaceans—all this transmogrified into a fantastical Kittle between avian creature* and shellfish. (Iregory Corso, chat
beatnik lyricist who spoke hglitlie.un-dl> ol tin- "knitted lames" ot UN cdto'l battle, a-, if evoking »-o mans gigantu kuiiiuig needles, listem .1 Id the paintings' metallic ruusi, , io "each i omliat.uit's mouth       a < is(l of song / each iron fist a dreamy gong." Although Uccello's puturm show soldiers dying in perspective. Corso sees them alive foi ctctmiy, never expiring, and lie wishes to enter into this, tuneless ench.umneiit. "How I dream tn join mil Ii kittle." he wntes, "never to die but to h* endless   ,i golden prune of pieton.il war." The playful turn nfi'.ono'fl fantasy is unmistakable, for he evokes the "flowery tale" of Keats'*| ' (ire< i.m Urn," a pastoral of "happy. Iiappy boughs'," of "happy, li | love," of lovers "forever young." Like Keats \ lovers, (. or-o's soldiery suspended in art beyond lime, will never die
Hut who was this painter who so fired the imagination of other artists and poets? Will we ever know? Six years before he died in 1475, ,1 Uccello wrote to the Florentine tax office, in one of the few documents we have oflus life. "I am old and sick, my wile is ill. and I can no longer work." Such utterances by themselves, however, do not a biography make, and it was not until seventy-five years alter his death that Vasan wrote the painter's biography itt his fabulous fan-.* ot the .mists. Uccello emerges here, like the personages of his own art, as himself a fictional < h.ir.mer. He i\ a hit of a siitiplcton ot fool, who paints a camel where he should ha\'e painted a chameleon. He is an artist lost 111 the studs o| Ins "sweet perspective" when his wife calls him to sleep. He is a painter who entered through such perspective into the realm oi uncertainty, as I )onarcllo Mid when shown one of Uccello'j overwrought works, The painter became increasingly melancholic, solitary, and strange, almost savage in his decline, dying 111 poverty and discontent, Ui cello says that the abbot at San Miniato, where he is painting, has given him so much cheese to eat that he doesn't know anymore whether, it this diet is can tinned, he will remain himself or turn to v heese. He reminds us of Boo ,111 to's goofy t '..ilandrino, another painter easily deceived, «ho is convinced on one Decision that he ts invisible and on another that he t* pregnant. He reminds us too of the fat carpenter, who ts tricked by Li run el lest hi (with the help of Oonatello) into believing he is not himself. Playing on Uccello'* name, which means "bird," Vasan metamorphoses hun into a simple reincarnation of the proverbial t alaminno, whose name also suggests a bird, in this case, a titlark. The word "bird" in Italian also means a simpleton, and as Calandrino is a fcathcHiead. a
lloilo   1 I.....In, or .1 tinki s. is \se ituglil vis  I "i. cllo "• 1 I'll o| a bud
■Mil, a gull, a gullible fellow. Who ever heard ol a painter who became I (licese'
Whv was I'aolo Uccello. whose legal name was Paolo di l>ono, , ill. I I I, ( ello: Vasari claims or pretends that he was so named because
painter, who especially loved birds (as well as all animals), painted 1 into Ins works because he was so poor that he could nor afford to 1  I hre them. Hut "who Ills scared all these birds away?" Italo C'alvhio
i I .1 I here are almost no birds 111 Uccello's known works, although. i> Visari says, the painter did render "birds 111 perspective"' m one fresi o ji Santa Maria Novella Did all the other birds fly away, like those |i,iniiid In B.uinlo (iioggi 111 one delightful stors of the lourteenth cen-luo, 11 ild In franco Sjcchctti? Or is Vasari fantasizing?
I'aolo Uccello is part of the menagerie of Vasan"s imagination He is
II 'In .rrange and eccentric Picrw di (. iosimo. who draws lots * si" birds iind beasts and is himself a wild man. bestial in his ways, Although hero, i.l 1 Uccello. is a painter in real life, his biography, for all its facts, is
1 \ fictional—a tact that many literal-minded art historians have
1.....fie assimilating, since they ignore the role of fiction 111 shaping his-
tocs lo say that I'iero's or Uccello\ biography is conceived imaginatively is not to deny that the artists existed or that Vasari's hiograplnes of these .mists are filled with facts. It is to recognize that these biographies ttc shaped, .ire deeply heave.
UcccQo aKo resembles Leonardo, who sumlark loved buds, but whereas Uccello wished to keep them, Leonardo would buy them so that he could release them from then cages, giving them their freedom. \ lover of other living creatures, like Uccello. Leonardo brought lizards, 1 ipents. and insects into Ins studio, where he fashioned a creatine like Vteilus... <>i so Vasan pretends, and applied ouu kstiver to a lizard, adding wings to turn the creature into a sort of terrifying dragon in order to frighten his visitors. Otherwise .1 p.iudigni <>l courtly grace. Leonardo was sometimes just a bit weird and indulged 111 his own "madness" when In ni.uli IvJlnoi   out ot the guts ot animals.
Strange artists who love annuals are every ss here tn the poetical imagination. Vasan says that Leonardo's disciple Kustici, himself .1 magician, had many snakes in his home He also kept ,1 porcupine under his table, which rubbed itself like .1 dog against the legs of his visitors, to iheit considerable discomfort. Animals were everywhere to be seen in
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tin- house nt (he pintor Sodoma. who was i ailed "I ntlc Fool" by one hi'his pauons. Sodoma kept badgers, squirrels, iiiarmoseis, asses. In jays, fowl, turtledove, even ,i raven wlut h answered in pcrtt-i t imitation of its master's voice whenever anyone knocked at the door. Sodoma \ house was, Vis.in slates, i veritable Noah's Ark. I lie painter possessed .ill the animals and birds ili.it poor Uia.llo desired. We do not know ill the tacts of Sodomas lite, hut we can he reasonably confident that Va sari's account of the painter is at the very least a poetical embellishmiMII of the facts, an account enriched by fiction.
Whereas Uccello li related by implication to all of VasarTs stu animal-loving painters, he is explicitly connected to the eccentric her metic Pontonno. who also lived in solitude. The art of both painters, Vasari says, comparing them directly, b Overdone, too labored, in J trail scends the bounds of the respective anis;s' natural pits. No less that!1] Uccello does I'ontonno faritastuatc contrived pic tonal devices that, leaving the real world behind, reach beyond the boundaries of tin fti
.:(-.. I ' '   "11 .in
When wc step back and look at Uccello afresh, we see that in tbffc; excessive fantasy and obsessive tenor ot his quest for perspective, he 1» the Don Quixote of painters, an artistic ancestor nt the Knight ot the Doleful Countenance, Poetically seeking to refashion the world in accord with his perspectival dreams that rise beyond "reality," Uccello is a knight-errant of painters, as Quixote, steeped in the conventions of romance, is liiiusell .1 poet, rcimagimug the world m .uiord with his i In valru fantasies. No matter that the Arno Valley of Uccello is tar m rime and place from the plain of Quixote's La Maricha, No matter that we i .mum easily trace the path from one place to the other in the maw of imagination. The simple, foolish, deluded, even mad Florentine painter is a Don Quixote ,u,m! I.i letlu; tilting ai the windmills of perspectival fantasy. The beloved books of Euclid on geometry and optics arc to Uccello what Amadii cfi ~»titl is (rj Dun Quixote.
[s not our quixotu painter, possessed by perspective and out of touch with the real world, as Vasari imagined him into being, run the first obsessive artist in the history of art? And if so. is he not one of the ancestors of Freuhoter in Balzac's "The Unknown Masterpiece?" Balzac's crazed old painter had labored lor ten yean on a portrait of a courtesan, seeking not just to paint her likeness but to invest her with the spirit of life! When he finally reveals his picture to Poussin. the image is
i multitude of fantastical lines, a log ul formlessness Under this coulu »hm. no less batHing than I \ cello's overdone pcispci live studies shown (.. I »otiaiillo. there does appear a perle* try rendered foot—■ dim clue of tin mi.nt,unable goal of the mad painter, who expires immediately after rsposing his "masterpiece."
Although we cannot easily trace the obscure path from Uccello to I '    otc, the maze from Uccello to Frenhofer and from Frctihofer back I L'Cello is ihreadable. Haifa century after Bal/ac told his romauin I tunic artistic ambition. Marcel Schwöb retold Vasan'i fable of the ndary Uccello. rewriting it through Balzac's own tale of art. Schwöb s story, told in his ImtigimTy Lam, is a fable ot lender pathos Lost in the folly of his perspective studies. Uccello lives like a hermit. One do he beholds a young girl, his Beatrice, his Laura, who smiles at him. Noting all the subtle forms ot her taee, as only he can, Uccello loves her mil takes her home with him. in the evenings when Brunelleschi comes m study Willi Uccello, she falls asleep in the circle of the shadow i ast by (he painter's lamp, When she awakens in the morning she is surrounded I", ill the birds and beasts painted by Uicello Although the artist never punted her portrait, he nevertheless distilled all ot her tonus in the crucible of his art, likened to that of an alchemist, in which he also gathered ill (he lineaments of plants and stones, of the rays of light, of the waves • <l the sea. Lost in his studies like a hermit in his devotion or an alchemist in Ins search for a universal elixir. Uccello becomes forgetful ol the young girl, who eventually perishes, starving to death. Uccello now studies ihe contours of her inert bods, as lie ome recorded them in life, . n-.itmg not a portrait as such bur new forms of art.
Uccello grows old, St Im ob writes, and no one can comprehend his work. One sees in it only a confusion of lines. After working for years on an Otuvn Wpftmi, Uccello create* not the image of the earth, plants, animals, or men. but only a jumble of lines. Although Donatcllo thinks his painting flawed, Uccello believes he has worked a miracle in art When I 'eeello linally dies m his garret, Ins eyes are lixed on the uiWcry revealed to him, as if he had achieved his unattainable goal. In his hand In holds a round piece of parchment covered with interlacing lines that radiate from the center to the circumference and back again. Schwöb\ I kcello believes dial lie has created a masterpiece, whereas all that one sees m his supreme achievement is a contusion of fonils like those of Freuhoter.
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I lie labyrinth «i| literary history is olteu more simplex lhali «r allow. Might we not wonder in the tiixt plate about the sonar, ol Il.il zac's story? Whatever the exact intermediary path might he. n is tooted' in Vasan's fables of strange, solitary .hums like Uccello. who, aspiring t»i
the perfection of then art, labored slowly and haltingly OVCI ,i Ion |i nod iiť mne only to produce works that svere contused or dclon Although Balzac sets his tale in a Paris of earlier times, writing an .ill. ical "table of modern art," this fact should not prevent us from penetw] mg to its taproots in Italian legend. If ever the full history of obsession o written, including the history of the obsessive artist, tins account \sill need to be channeled into the meandering migrations o) Vasan's i I of artistu obsession into the mainstream of Modernism,
Baltic's fable of art. appropriated bv Schwob and projected retrospectively into Vasan's fable of Uccello, worked its spelt on Zola, whoid novel L'oeum- (translated svith license as The Mtsterjwcc) is about ihe Frenhofer-like artist CMaude Lmrier. inspired in part by the real punter Cezanne, who later identified himself spiritually "as the very person" of liilzac's story. This fusion of fact and ficnon induces vertigo. A real painter identifies svith a fictional artist, ssho descends from an imaginary Boccaceesque painter, who is fabricated from t real artist. In the mtm an maze of history, the boundaries between the real and the imaginary dissolve, the real becoming fictional, the imaginary becoming real. Uciello is a type of Calandrino or lát carpenter; Frenhotcr, who descends from Uccello, conies to life as I'ezaime. who says, m effect, Trenhofer. c "est moi."
lint the story does not end here, for the obsessive Frenhofcr aluo becomes the subject of contemplation for Picasso, some of whose playful drawings lor an edition of "The Unknown Masterpiece" evoke the elaborate jumble ol lines ol St hwob's Frenlmferian Uccello and Vasan's proto-Frenhofenan Uccello lost m the uncertainty of his overly contrived perspective devices—10 artist who labors unrelentingly, it not anxiously, against the freight of negative i ntw .il judgment and failure. Uccello .ilso comes to mind when Picasso's friend Apoilinatre writes in praise of I )ouanier Rousseau, a painter of animals, flowers, and children, of primitive dreams and jungles, the supposedly naive painter whom the poet likens to Uccello. The tittccnth-centiiry Florentine painter rims emerges in the modem imagination as a sort of quattrocento primitive
M   I 'iitianier Rousseau, although Apoilinatre doct M knowledge that Uii ello's lev liuique is superior
I lu- labyrinthine paths ol Uciello lead us b.u.k and lorth through In ton  i through a maze-—back to Ruskm, convinced that the painter
■ ii oil his head with love of perspective." forward to Joan Miro. i    .mini by the artiM's pictorial structures, and back again to Nwin-
i......       s i onteuiporanes. who saw the poet's very likeness in the Ehitilf of
■ I ."iMun. Hm before we depart tins bewildering network of poetical
i..... lei us attend to one of the most beguiling transformations of
I i. Ilo in tin modern period, tins j poem by {iiov.inni Pascoh from tin Unlit Poems, recalled by Calvuio—a free rewriting of Vasan's biography of Uccello no less imaginary than Schwob's vie imagmrite of the pointer.
In Pascoli's poetical fantasia, after Uciello returns from the market, Where he has seen all the birds he cannot aflord to purchase, he sadly n one of them; he also adorns his room \sith field, flowers, and ♦tees, filled with all the other birds he could not acquire'—titmice, nightingales, swans, ravens, eagles, doves, birds with blue. red. green, and ',. How plumage. So lost is Uccello in the contemplation of his beloved, imaginary birds that he is deaf to the bells of the cathedral, sounding the In in of Ave Maria. Saint Francis appears to jhiie I 'uctlo. telling him that In must not covet the little birds, which should be allowed to keep their n.. loin Speaking to Uccello as he had once pre.ulied to the malliiii, the little birds themselves, the saint miraculously brings to life all the birds that Uccello had painted in his house They fly down to the artist, who blissfully lalb asleep as a nightingale smgs.
The real Paolo Uccello, as we noted, is a shadowy figure, scarcely known to us Irom the relanvely few paintings and documents that have mvived. all ol which by themselves hardly constitute a "life." The punter nonetheless looms larger than life in the imagination as a legend-us figure. A quixotic, obsessive painter, no less preoccupied with birds than with reaching the unattainable perfection of perspective, he is a l-ieat-grandfathei of all modem artists, real or iin.igm.iTv. who -tine to achieve the unattainable in (heir art. Hut in contrast to the complex, dark temperaments of the Modernists, real and imaginary, of Frcnhofer in.: i Vv.mnc. Ui.tello. who pursues the complexities of perspective, is, finally, and perhaps paradoxically, a bit of a simpleton Working in solitude, he is a saintly hennit. a devoted scholar of Euclid, an .ilcheunsr
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among painters, Scarcely in^ii, lie is pathctii . sweet, .mil m^timmnJB primitive, j child. .1 madman, who embodies the (jntasies m K'liimrl innocence, spirituality, imagination, and even insanity. ContemplitiH this odd, gentle tool, who was once almost turned into a cliecne. u Ik
i!......'. i ■ <■   •■ ■ i       ' 11'.11 ' .r!     i   i    i,- ii : |>.. ■ ■ i    .| :.nii ■•, it . II
which has metamorphosed the historical Paolo di I >ono into die mi Mi|0 captivating, and fictional being who haunts our poetical im.i^m.itttti no less than he was onee so sweetly, possessed by his own Strang pcrspet live.
S 1 X
llinNAHnO, VASARI, ANT) Till- HISTORICAL IMAGINATION
Wtllough Vasari's Liir> of die artists is die foundjtion.il texi in the toi-ni.itioii of modern an history and has i omcquetifJv inspired .1 tinge hods • il. ntu (Mil .ind m hol.irship. the investigation of his teennd work remains partial, some might even s.iv superficial. Aspects of his book have been in lully examined, such as his use ol soun.es, his theory of art, and his tntti isni. hut surprisingly little attention has been paid by students of It. naissance culture—by histonans, an historians, and scholars of literatim' ,ilike—to his historical imagination
As deeply poetical as it is historically shrewd. Vxs.iri's imagination almunds in his tine prose, nowhere more clearly than in the fables or Mi>rr//r which infonn his biographies of the artists. Of all these tales one 1'i the richest and most Unions is the story Vas.iri tells nt boss the young I ■ imi.iido. on a small, wooden shield or buckler, painted a monster that intended CO produce the effect of the tabled Medusa. In the nme-
.....th century, Walter Pater sensed that this story was a fiction, "perhaps
jn invention." as he said, but he also recognized its "air of tnith." by Which lie meant us historical vensiniilitude. Although for a very long time art historians often misread Vasan. either misconstruing his fictions is facts or misidenuryinjj t|:<-m H i rror*. u: ret en: yBttH the) haw iv-tunied iiNTeasmgK to Caters poml of view, recognizing the deeper