Paolo Uccello’s The Hunt in the Forest – a timeless masterpiece that continues to delight

I recently bought a new laptop. As we always do with all our newfangled contraptions, I immediately personalised the settings to individuate my device. While pondering what picture I wanted to greet my weary waking eyes as I log into my laptop every morning for work, I realised what the perfect painting is to brighten my vision, engage my gaze and encourage protracted bouts of concentration – Paolo Uccello’s The Hunt in the Forest.

An extraordinary Renaissance study of perspective, Uccello’s masterpiece extended the assumed boundaries of technical ingenuity whilst brilliantly retaining the aesthetic allure of spiritual speculation. It has rightfully become an powerful image in the history of Western art and continues to profoundly beguile viewers over five centuries after its composition.

Its creator was a curious man, a medieval Florentine who was committed to developing his medium, a pioneer who sought to marry mathematical comprehension to artistic aspirations.

I first came across Uccello’s nocturnal hunt when I read about his life in Vasari’s Lives of the Artists. Vasari’s profile of Uccello describes an eccentric and mathematically-minded craftsman. He was often employed to adorn lavish pieces of expensive furniture and to decorate cloisters, chambers and doorways in the homes of famous families or in venerated places of worship.

Vasari relays an apocryphal anecdote about Uccello refusing to come to bed at his wife’s behest because he was too entranced by his perspective-based lucubrations. The discovery of new artistic techniques appears to have satisfied the maestro as much as sex and sleep.

He died, according to Vasari, poor and despondent, at the grand old age of seventy-seven. After finishing Vasari’s account of the peculiar painter, I leafed through his catalogue, recognising image after image from school trips and kitsch-cultural references to the Renaissance.

My mum has a mug with his Battle of San Romano printed on it, and there are tea-towels, t-shirts and fridge magnets in homes across the world that bear many of Uccello’s most impressive depictions. There is a flawlessness to the design of Uccello’s art, the best of which was purpose-built to mesmerise and delight the human eye.

Of all of Uccello’s surviving works that I looked over after reading Vasari, none enchanted me more than The Hunt in the Forest. Horizontally long and vertically short (73cm x 1.77m), the painting comprises of three storeys. The riotous hunt of hounds, humans and horses at the base; the tenebrous-emerald gold-flecked canopy hanging overhead and the appealing abyss, yawning infinitely through the trees in the middle.

Commissioned by an unknown client of Uccello’s, experts believe that the piece is a spalliera, a picture intended for a headboard of a bed or a backboard mounted on a wall. The spellbinding juxtaposition of vibrant colours and caliginous recessions seizes a viewer’s sight, seductively drawing our observations to Uccello’s vanishing conclusion, a dark and elusive destination.

The scene is arguably an amorous allegory, as it likely hung over a daybed or couch and its subject suggests a pursuit, a theme which if incepted into the minds of the intended observers would have invoked ideas of romance.

The chaos of the hunting party is expertly choreographed to bolt the eye like a pinball from horses to hounds, from the crowded foreground through the colonnade of lissom trunks and into the darkened distances.

The rhythmic regularity of the moving figures augments the pull of Uccello’s perspective, making it near-impossible not to peer into the mystifying opacity of the dusky woods where the unseen end of this activity awaits. The mathematics of the image serves an emotional effect.

It compels whoever looks upon it to pine for an unobtainable end, for the evincing of an eternally concealed conclusion.

Currently housed in the Ashmolean Museum, this prize of the Early Renaissance seems to sum up a prevailing sentiment in modern western culture – a yearning for the inaccessible, a metaphorical chase for what cannot be acquired. Tantalising as it must have been in the 1470s, Uccello’s The Hunt in the Forest charmingly captivates my casual morning glances every day, making me smile before I have to peruse my inbox.