Paolo’s masterpiece is the equestrian portrait of Sir John Hawkwood, Figure 94, the English soldier of fortune and occasional captain of the Florentine army, which is in the Cathedral. It is painted in gray-green touched with color, and simulates a tomb. The date is 1437. Since Roman times no equestrian monument of equal dignity had been created, and one is inclined to suspect that Uccello profited by preliminary studies of Donatello, his close friend, which later developed into the superb Gattamelata statue at Padua. Uccello has a lighter vein illustrated by furniture panels at Oxford, (a Hunt), at Paris, and Vienna, (St. George and the Dragon), but his most ambitious work is the decoration of the lunettes in the great cloister of Santa Maria Novella. The stories are drawn from the Old Testament, were started by Paolo, about the year 1446, and continued by several assistants. The medium was gray-green, _terra verde_, and the place accordingly is called the Green Cloister. Uccello’s manner may be best sensed in the fresco of the Deluge, in which the endeavor to set problems in perspective clashes unhappily with the desire to present a scene of terror. The figures are felt one at a time, there is little relation between them, and the picture has small merit apart from its probity in the rendering of details and a sort of abstract earnestness. Uccello lived on till 1475, an indulged eccentric, ignored by the public and ridiculed by his greater friends. His zeal for perspective was unabated with age, and many a night his much-tried wife lost sleep as he murmured in the small hours—“O! thou dear perspective!” [Illustration: FIG. 94. Paolo Uccello. Tomb Portrait of Sir John Hawkwood.—_Cathedral._ ] [Illustration: FIG. 96. Andrea del Castagno. Portrait of a young man.—_J. P. Morgan Coll., N. Y._ ] [Illustration: FIG. 95. Andrea del Castagno. Pippo Spano.—_Sant’ Apollonia._ ] [Illustration: FIG. 97. Andrea del Castagno. Tomb portrait of Niccolò da Tolentino.—_Cathedral._ ]