Miracle of the Desecrated Host
7:00 AM |
| Paulo Uccello, Miracle of the Desecrated Host, Scene 1, 1466 |
Donatello once told Paolo Uccello to stop wasting his time on the pointless endeavor of perspective painting.
But Uccello did not listen, and that brings us to Scene 1 of “The Miracle of the Desecrated Host.”
Uccello’s talents may have been misplaced but his intentions were good. As a trailblazer for Renaissance perspective painting, he was doing the best he could. Uccello, a mathematician and mosaicist in Florence in the early 1400s, began painting in the studio of Lorenzo Ghiberti. This is where he met and became friends with Donatello, and it was also where he fostered his interest in perspective. Influenced by Ghiberti and the simple geometry of the time, Uccello began implementing clumsy attempts at perspective in his sketches and paintings (for a particularly novice attempt, check out the 1458 version of St. George and the Dragon.) Uccello attempted to use perspective to give his frescoes depth, while the conventional application was to narrate different stories within the same painting. Despite his innovative notions, he lacked the skill and knowledge to execute his ideas very well. Since he worked in mosaics for much of his life, he was accustomed to flatness, and creating depth in his paintings was troublesome. He spent hours working at night trying to master the vanishing point and create depth of field, to no avail. We can laugh at his feeble attempts, but at least he was trying really,really hard.
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| It's a mess. |
The Miracle of the Desecrated Host is arguably one of his best attempts, or at least it is one of his most obvious attempts. At face value, we believe that the room looks relatively correct-ish. But do not be fooled. Under further inspection, there appears to be many different vanishing points. This room just doesn’t make sense on a fundamental level. I’m not mad at Uccello. I commend him for trying to do something new and innovative, and without a textbook or Google search to guide him. I took a perspective drawing class six years ago, and I understand his frustrations.
Thankfully, like many of Uccello’s works, my drawings have also been lost (okay, fine, I recycled them.) But at least we have this proof that Uccello wasn’t completely hopeless. It would take artists a few centuries to master the science and skill of true perspective. I’m glad Uccello didn’t heed Donatello’s advice. He sparked something new and exciting in the art world, and every artistic movement, from Impressionism to Realism, has benefitted from it.
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