The Early Works of Paolo Uccello

Apart from some slight suggestions, mainly put forward by Roberto Longhi, critical literature on Paolo Uccello has limited itself in these last years to dealing with a few new and by no means always convincing attributions, without any effort to make clear the part played by this great master in the early Florentine Renaissance as a whole. We are still without an adequate analysis of his art as deducible from his few authenticated works, which should furnish the basis for all further knowledge of his artistic personality-a personality which, in our belief, has, as a result of erroneous attributions, been wrongly conceived during the last generation of art criticism. That most important and most difficult problem of his artistic derivation and of his earliest productions remains to be solved. 1