Context
In the Quattrocento, it was traditional for condottieri like Hawkwood to be buried in major public churches, even when their careers had produced mixed results for the city-state in question. The genre of the equestrian statue was revived during the Quattrocento for the purpose of commemorating condottieri; Donatello's Equestrian Statue of Gattamelata (c. 1447–1453) in Padua is the first surviving bronze equestrian statue since Ancient Rome. Tibertino Brandolino was interred at San Francesco in Venice; Jacopo de' Cavalli at SS. Giovanni e Paolo in Rome; Paolo Savelli at Basilica dei Frari in Venice, along with a wooden equestrian statue on a marble sarcophagus, which—along with the bronze horses on the façade of St. Mark—may have inspired Uccello's Hawkwood; and Konrad Aichelberg at a church in Pisa. When such burials were not possible, frescoes were an acceptable substitute: Guidoriccio da Fogliano was painted on horseback by Simone Martini in Palazzo Pubblico in Siena in 1328; Pietro Farnese was depicted in a papier-mâché equestrian monument atop a sarcophagus in the Florence Cathedral in 1363.
Holding ever more lavish funeral ceremonies for fallen condottieri was only one way in which Italian city-states competed with each other to attract the services of the most skilled mercenaries. Hawkwood's funeral was sandwiched between the funerals in Siena of Giovanni d'Azzo degli Ubaldini—who had been poisoned by the Florentines in the Visconti wars—and Giovanni "Tedesco" da Pietramala. The commissioning of Uccello to repaint the fresco came at the "climax" of a war with Lucca, which had recently begun a monument to honor Niccolò Piccinino, in contrast to Piccinino's pittura infamante in the Palazzo della Signoria in 1428, depicting him hanging upside-down in chains, which was "depaint" in April 1430.
Read more about this topic: Funerary Monument To Sir John Hawkwood
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