Paolo Uccello
The Hunt in the Forest
c. 1470
Painted in about 1470, Paolo Uccello's 'The Hunt in the Forest' is a late, horizontal panel that deploys his lifelong obsession with linear perspective to striking theatrical effect. Huntsmen in red and blue, their leaping hounds, and fleeing deer all converge on a single vanishing point deep inside a dark wood, their bodies arranged in the rhythms of a Renaissance dance. The deliberately artificial geometry — reinforced by fallen logs and the repeated verticals of tree trunks — turns the hunt into a meditation on depth itself, and the picture is widely recognised as the Ashmolean Museum's greatest 15th-century Italian painting.
Exhibition Venue
Image source: Wikimedia Commons