Step inside the cathedral, walk a little way in, then turn all the way around and look up above the doors you just came through. There's a huge clock painted up there — and something about it is wrong. It has a single hand. The numbers run one to twenty-four. And the hand sweeps backward, counterclockwise, the opposite of every clock you have ever read.
This is Paolo Uccello's clock, painted in the fourteen forties, and it is not broken. It's keeping time the way Florence used to keep time, and it simply never stopped. Around the dial are four painted heads — prophets, glaring out from the corners — done by a man who was, right about then, quietly losing himself to a brand-new obsession: perspective, the mathematics of depth. Uccello isn't even his real surname; it means "the bird." He earned it, the story goes, by filling his house with painted animals he was too poor to actually own — dogs, cats, birds on every wall — a man who would rather render a creature than keep one. He was so
consumed by vanishing points that, by the old account, his wife complained he'd sooner spend the night with perspective than with her.
That obsession bled into his real work, too. His most famous paintings are battle scenes, and you can see the fixation right there on the canvas: the broken lances of the fallen soldiers all lie on the ground lined up along a perfect perspective grid, pointing ti
