The Hunt in the Forest

Paolo Uccello was obsessed with perspective, the new mathematical trick for making a flat panel look deep, and by the time he painted this he was an old man near the end of a long Florentine career. It was his last known work, around 1470. He lays a hidden grid across the scene and shrinks the huntsmen, horses, dogs and deer as they rush away from us, so the whole crowd funnels toward a single point swallowed by the dark trees. And it is dark. This is a hunt by night, an aristocratic pastime, probably painted to decorate the wall of a grand house. A thin crescent moon, the sign of Diana, the ancient goddess of the hunt, hangs in the sky and appears again on the trappings of the horses.