Five Famous Men of the Florentine Renaissance

Five heads in a row on a long black panel, and their names are painted beneath them: Giotto, Paolo Uccello, Donatello, Antonio Manetti and Filippo Brunelleschi. By the 16th century Florence was busy writing the history of its own artists, and Giorgio Vasari, the painter who published the first great collection of artists' lives in 1550, describes a picture much like this one. According to him, Uccello painted five men who each stood for an art, Giotto for painting, Brunelleschi for architecture, Donatello for sculpture, Manetti for mathematics and Uccello himself for perspective. For a long time this panel was taken to be that very work, and when the Louvre bought it at a Paris sale in March 1847 it was catalogued as an Uccello. The museum now gives it to an anonymous Florentine painter working some time in the first half of the 16th century.