Uccello (born Paolo di Dono) (Florence, 1397 - d.1475) was a Florentine painter who was a notable exponent of visual perspective in art.Giorgio Vasari in his book Lives of the Artist wrote that Uccello was obsessed by his interest in perspective and would stay up all night in his study trying to grasp the exact vanishing point. He used perspective in order to create a feeling of depth in his paintings and not, as his contemporaries, to narrate different or succeeding stories.

His best known works are the three paintings representing the Battle of San Romano (for a long time this was wrongly entitled the "Battle of Sant' Egidio of 1416").

Paolo worked in the Late Gothic tradition, and emphasized colour and pageantry rather than the Classical realism that other artists were pioneering. His style is best described as idiosyncratic, and he left no school of followers. He had some influence on twentieth century art and literary criticism.

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Volume 21, number 2: Emerging Themes, Emerging Voices
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Volume 21, number 2: Copley's Cargo
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In 1765, John Singleton Copley sent his painting Henry Pelham (Boy with a Squirrel) from Boston to London in hopes of receiving feedback from the arbiters of academic aesthetics. Several months later, he received the welcome news that Sir Joshua Reynolds had called the painting "wonderfull." In virtually every scholarly narrative of early American art, Boy with a Squirrel derives its canonical significance from this famous transatlantic relay. But the most basic reality of that relay–the massive fact of the Atlantic Ocean standing between Copley and his interlocutors–has barely been registered in the scholarship.This essay interprets Boy with a Squirrel in terms of the difficulty and delicacy of its transatlantic transmission. I argue that Copley, as he attempted to create a painting that would have the necessary transitive qualities, drew from an array of familiar discourses of Atlantic exchange and transport. The painting's profile format evoked strategies of numismatic exchange. The precise representation of the flying squirrel tapped into well-established transatlantic natural history circuits. The spatial transformations of the composition echoed not only empiricist theories of sensory conveyance (especially the writings of George Berkeley), but also mirrored the workaday dynamics of the shipping and reassembly of transatlantic commodities. Copley, like many other colonial artists, worked in a global community governed by distance, difference, and delay. By attending to the vehicular context of Boy with a Squirrel, we can begin to understand his strategies for articulating–and navigating–that new global space.

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