Uccello, Paolo

(born 1397, Pratovecchio, near Florence—died Dec. 10, 1475, Florence) Italian painter. Though apprenticed to the sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti, he is not known to have worked in sculpture, and at 18 he was admitted to the painters' guild in Florence. The Deluge, one of his frescoes in the Chiostro Verde of Santa Maria Novella, demonstrates his intense study of perspective. He became so firmly identified with perspective that John Ruskin thought he had invented it. His three panels depicting the Battle of San Romano, like all the extant works of his mature years, combine the decorative late Gothic style with the new heroic style of the early Renaissance.