Uccello - St George & the Dragon

I've just realised its St George's Day. I know its in April but I never remember when, so I'm grateful for Google's ever-changing search page. You know what artists I like best so you already knew which painting I was going to put up today.

Ladies and Gentlemen, this is Uccello's St George & the Dragon. Click here for a nice break down and contextualisation of both the myth and the painting. Mr Graham-Dixon, who I seem unable to escape these last few months, also does well with it here.

As it is in the National Gallery I made a point of seeing it on Sunday. It always catches me out; it always far smaller than I remember. It looms large in the memory with its epic composition and dual perspective. Add in the obsessive detail and it feels enormous, but in reality Uccello had the touch of a miniaturist at times and the obsessive qualities necessary to paint tiny details consistently. Some of the details in the Hunt in the Forest particular are hair's-breadth fine.

His work often leaves me uneasy and this one does more than most. Uccello worked at a time when artists were refining a new trend for naturalistic poses and spatial representation. He is famed for his part within this shift, but other artists did a better job of foreshortening, locating a figure on a ground surface and suggesting physicality. I suspect Uccello didn't care about space as such. It is well known he was obsessed with perspective but his work is never realistic. I wonder if maybe his obsession was fuelled more by the creative possibilities of this innovation. In the Hunt he uses perspective to create rhythm, rhyme and structure. In St George he uses it to make disquieting contradictions. In the Battle of San Romano he uses it in some places but not others so there is a constant fluctuation between space and surface - an idea that is of fundamental importance in my own practice.

I like to imagine him as a cantankerous old man, viewing most of the innovations that were going on around him as new-fangled fads. His work stands at a crossroads; looking back to the medieval traditions of heraldry and chivalry and the older Byzantine aesthetic; looking forward to new trends in subject matter. To one side stylistic innovations he embraces, to the other, those he views with disdain. Which way did he go? Into which tradition did he fit? He didn't. He never left. He just mapped each direction in perfect one point perspective. This is what makes his work so interesting and utterly unique.

The Hunt in the Forest

There is nothing that needs to be said about this painting, other than it is my second-most favourite painting in the world, ever. One of the reasons I took a job and a flat in Oxford 10 years ago was so that I could see this at the Ashmolean whenever I wanted. Just one point though: click on the painting to see the enlargement and pay attention to the structure of the composition; now scroll down the page to the Menin Road and its plain to see from the rhythms and geometry that there's a good chance Paul Nash, with all his links to Oxfordshire, saw this painting, liked this painting and was heavily influenced by it.