Storie dei santi eremiti

Paolo Uccello's Stories of the Holy Hermits, painted around 1447 for San Miniato al Monte in Florence, depicts scenes from the lives of the Desert Fathers in a panoramic composition. The Thebaid subject, showing hermits in their cells across a vast landscape, was popular with monastic communities Paolo Uccello was obsessed with the new science of linear perspective, using it to create dizzying spatial experiments that astonished and sometimes perplexed his contemporaries.

The expansive landscape composition distributes numerous small narrative scenes across the panel, with Uccello's characteristic geometric approach to landscape and figure creating a pattern of ordered vignettes within the desert setting.