A knight in a huge hat of red and gold velvet, with no helmet, spurs a white horse into the charge while lances slant across the panel like a fence. Armored riders clash to the right, and broken lances and pieces of armor lie scattered in the foreground. Behind them rise a hedge of orange trees and a pale hillside with tiny fighters in the distance. The knight is the Florentine captain Niccolò da Tolentino, leading the cavalry at the Battle of San Romano in 1432, during Florence's war against Lucca, Milan and Siena.

Paolo Uccello painted this panel, one of three, for Leonardo Bartolini Salimbeni around the time of his second marriage in 1438. The National Gallery says the scene is formal, almost courtly, more concerned with glorifying the Florentine victory than with exact events. Fascinated by the new science of perspective, Uccello laid the broken lances out in a grid. In 1484 Lorenzo de' Medici forcibly removed the panels from the Salimbeni house and installed them in his private room in the Medici palace.

The National Gallery bought this one in 1857; the others are in the Uffizi and the Louvre. It is in the National Gallery in London.