Paolo Uccello's Polyhedra

    Paolo Uccello (1397-1475) was a Florentine painter and mosaicist important for helping to establish the perspective style in early Renaissance art. He also was a lover of geometry and had a strong influence in the practice of including polyhedral forms in artwork. At right is a detail of his 1448 fresco The Flood showing a figure wearing a mazzocchio --- a "hat" in the form of a polyhedral torus, worn by wealthy men in 15th century Florence.  Below, is a drawing in which Uccello shows the form as a polyhedron in careful perspective. Drawings of this sort were likely used as patterns for intarsia.

    Shown below is a marble inlay which features the small stellated dodecahedron, located in the floor of the Basilica of St. Mark in Venice. Many references attribute this to Uccello.  If so, it is remarkable, for this would be two hundred years before Kepler's 1619 mathematical description of this same polyhedron.  Uccello was known as a master mosaicist in Venice in the 1420's, but all of that work is lost. I have not been able to locate any explanation of the evidence attributing this particular inlay to Uccello or how it is dated to that period, and so I can not judge its plausibility.

     
    Virtual Polyhedra, (c) 1998, George W. Hart