Paolo Uccello

Born Paolo di Dono in 1397, he came up in Florence as the Renaissance was gathering speed around him, but he never quite joined the classical realist wave his peers were riding. Instead he stayed loyal to Late Gothic's love of color and ceremony, then bent it through his fixation: the geometry of depth, the grid beneath the eye. Perspective became his private laboratory; Vasari wrote that he'd lock himself in his study through the night, working out vanishing points like equations. The San Romano trilogy - three panels of a battle long misidentified as Sant'Egidio - landed as his defining work, perspective deployed not for realism but for something stranger and more personal. He left no students, founded no movement, but the idiosyncratic path he cut found admirers centuries later in Schwob, Artaud, and Tolentino. He died in Florence on 10 December 1475.