2 January 2026
Spent significant time with Uccello's Battle of San Romano (1438-40) at the National Gallery today, was transfixed by it. I remember reading about it in the Guston book I Paint What I Want to See, particularly the bit where he highlights how lovely it is to reconcile the depiction with the sensation. That is, for example, how the physics of the piece are in service of the sensation of the piece, not the other way around. I think he says something specifically about the mass of horse legs on the left of the painting, how it's kind of impossible to parse them, but that parsing them is beside the point. For me, the spatial exploration was the thing. It is restless in its asking of spatial questions. Any given element of the piece represents a problem probed to the artist's limit—the foregrounded knight lying facedown is the glaring one, but the lances throughout create a logic and a wireframe structure for the entire thing to play off of (that also extends beyond the work—the lances rocket the eye out of the frame over and over). And the color was wonderful. Apparently it has faded quite a bit over time (greens have turned black, vermilion has turned blue-grey, flesh has turned green, etc.), but to my eyes that just made the luminous bits (oranges, whites, pinks, blues) pop even more. And the last thing I want to mention here is the emotion of it. Bizarrely (but satisfyingly) neutral. A leeching of Uccello's personality in service of the formal issues he was working out. Which gives the whole thing a frozen air, like a scene paused and analyzed under a microscope.