In room A8 of the Uffizi, which it shares with Masaccio and Fra Angelico, hangs a panel more than three metres wide, full of horses, lances and armour: it is The Battle of San Romano by Paolo Uccello, painted around 1435-1440, and it tells of a clash between Florentines and Sienese fought in 1432.
One thing, though, the wall label doesn’t say: that panel is one third of a single work. The other two parts are in London and Paris, split apart in the nineteenth century.
Remember that the Uffizi closes on Mondays and that entry runs on timed slots. Room A8 is at the start of the route, so you meet it while you’re still fresh, which is the right moment for a panel that asks for attention to detail.
Why are the broken lances on the ground laid out like the tiles of a floor?
Which of the three is in Florence, and it isn’t the first
If the three panels tell one story, at what point in the story have you walked in? The answer is precise: you’ve walked in halfway through.
The narrative order of the cycle runs like this, and many websites get it backwards:
- National Gallery, London, 180 by 320 centimetres: Niccolò da Tolentino at the Head of the Florentine Troops. This is the start of the attack.
- Uffizi, Florence, 182 by 323 centimetres: The Unhorsing of Bernardino della Carda, the Sienese captain. This is the centre, the moment the battle is decided.
- Louvre, Paris, 180 by 316 centimetres: The Decisive Intervention of Michele Attendolo on the Florentine Side. This is the end.
So Florence has neither the panel that opens the story nor the one that closes it. It has the blow itself, and it’s the panel that bears the painter’s signature, PAVLI VGIELI OPVS, at lower left.
What’s happening in the Uffizi panel
At the centre, on a white horse, a man in armour is falling from the saddle: he is Bernardino della Carda, commander of the Sienese troops, struck by a lance. His fall is the event of the day and the subject of the panel.
Around him the mêlée is dense, almost airless: overlapping horses, raised lances, breastplates. On the right are two horses seen from behind, one of them kicking out. They are the strangest thing in the picture: two clusters of legs and haunches turned toward you, painted to show that the artist could build a horse from any angle, not just in profile.
The lances on the ground are the floor of the perspective
Now lower your eyes, because the most important piece of painting in this panel isn’t a man or a horse.
On the ground, in the foreground, lie broken lances. They aren’t scattered at random: they’re arranged to draw a perspective grid, their lines converging toward the background. Paolo Uccello uses the broken weapons the way an interior painter would use floor tiles: to declare the depth of the space with a grid.
That’s why this is more than just a battle scene. Perspective had been codified in Florence only a few years earlier, and here it’s applied to a field of trampled earth, where no architectural lines are there to lean on. Paolo Uccello built his own floor out of the weapons of the dead.
Behind the hedge, there’s a hunt going on
Behind the mêlée runs a hedge, and beyond the hedge the painting changes genre entirely: there are young men hunting with crossbows, and a hare chased by a greyhound.
In the same panel, separated only by a painted hedge, a slaughter and a hunting party coexist. The background isn’t realistic and doesn’t try to be: it’s a decorative backdrop, almost a tapestry, that doesn’t connect with the space of the foreground.
And that’s where you see what Paolo Uccello really cares about. His battles don’t convey fear: they’re problems in geometry solved with horses, and the hunt behind the hedge fills with figures the part of the picture the battle doesn’t reach.
Why the three panels no longer line up
If the cycle was one continuous scene, why don’t the three panels align today? Because the shape you see isn’t the shape Paolo Uccello painted.
The three panels were originally arched at the top. When they were moved into the Medici palace, they were squared off to fit the wall and the space they had to fill, with cuts and later additions. The arches are gone, and with them the upper part of each composition.
Warning: almost every reproduction that puts the three panels side by side ignores this. The three panels aren’t a dismantled triptych that you could simply push back together: they are three surfaces already altered, now differing from one another by a few centimetres, and none of the three keeps its original outline.
Who commissioned them, and how they ended up with the Medici
For a long time the patron was assumed to be Cosimo the Elder. It wasn’t him. The panels were commissioned by Lionardo Bartolini Salimbeni, who paid for them in 1438, for his own palace: they were private furnishings for a Florentine family, not a commission of state.
The Medici came later, and not through an ordinary purchase. Lorenzo the Magnificent saw them at the Bartolini villa in Santa Maria a Quinto, pressed to have them, and got them in 1484. In the inventory drawn up after his death in 1492, the three panels appear on the ground floor of the Via Larga palace, in the room called the “camera di Lorenzo”.
The tail end of the story is documented. Andrea, one of Lionardo’s two sons, died in September 1494, and the Medici were driven out of the city that same November; on 30 July 1495 his brother Damiano filed a petition to get the three paintings back. He never did.
Where you can see all three together, and why it isn’t enough
There is one place where the three panels look at each other side by side, and it’s a village wall forty kilometres from Florence.
The battle of 1432 was fought at San Romano, today a hamlet within Montopoli in Val d’Arno, in the province of Pisa. Since 5 September 2026, with the three museums’ authorisation, the local Pro Loco has installed reproductions of the three panels on a wall on Via San Giovanni, at the entrance to the village, side by side once again.
Warning: these are reproductions, not the originals, even if some headlines might suggest otherwise. The originals remain in Florence, London and Paris, and the three real panels haven’t been together since two of them were sold in the nineteenth century.
Practical information
Facts checked on 10 September 2026 on the official website of the Uffizi Galleries and the official CoopCulture ticket office. Prices and hours change: check again before you go.
Where it is. The panel hangs in room A8, Masaccio - Fra Angelico - Paolo Uccello, on the second floor, at the start of the route. The inventory number is 1890 no. 479. Warning: several sources still place it “in room 7”, the numbering used before the rehang.
Tickets. A full-price ticket bought on the day at the counter costs 25 euros, and the same ticket booked ahead costs 29 euros, because the booking fee is added to the price. Since 1 January 2026 the afternoon rate is 16 euros for entries from 16:00 onward. The reduced ticket costs 2 euros and is reserved for EU citizens aged 18 to 25.
Hours. The museum opens Tuesday to Sunday, 8:15-18:30, with last entry at 17:30, and stays closed on Mondays, 1 January and 25 December.
Free entry. Admission is free for under-18s, for visitors with disabilities and one companion, with an ICOM card and for licensed tour guides. On the first Sunday of the month entry is free for everyone, and on those days you can’t book ahead.
Booking. You can book at tickets.uffizi.it, at 800 615 615 from Italy or +39 055 0354135 from abroad.
A warning about loans. In autumn 2026 the Uffizi devotes a major exhibition to Lorenzo the Magnificent, with more than a hundred works, and panels linked to the Medici collection are among the first candidates to change wall or leave altogether. If this panel is the reason for your trip, call the ticket office before you set out.
How much time it takes. The panel asks for a quarter of an hour, if you linger over the lances on the ground and the two horses seen from behind. Room A8 as a whole takes an hour, since it also holds Masaccio and Masolino’s Sant’Anna Metterza and Fra Angelico’s panels.
The rest of the Uffizi, and the rest of Paolo Uccello
Continuing along the route you reach Botticelli’s Primavera and Birth of Venus, then Leonardo’s Annunciation and Verrocchio’s Baptism in room A35 and Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo in A38; on the first floor is Titian’s Venus of Urbino. The short list is in Uffizi Gallery: masterpieces to see.
Florence has at least two more works by Paolo Uccello worth the detour: the equestrian monument to Giovanni Acuto, frescoed in the Cathedral, and the Flood painted for the Green Cloister of Santa Maria Novella, where perspective is pursued just as relentlessly on a biblical subject. His life and the works scattered across Europe are told in Paolo Uccello.
Photo credits: the reproductions of the three panels are in the public domain or CC0; the detail of the lances is published under CC BY-SA 4.0. All from Wikimedia Commons.
