Probably there is mostly fable in Vasari’s tale that when Verrocchio saw the angel that Leonardo had painted in The Baptism of Christ he “resolved never to touch the brush again, because Leonardo, though so young, had so far surpassed him.”26 But though Verrocchio continued to paint after the Baptism, it is true that he gave most of his mature years to sculpture. He worked for a while with Donatello and Antonio Pollaiuolo, learned something from each of them, and then developed his own style of stern and angular realism. He took his career in his hands by molding in terra cotta an unflattering bust of Lorenzo—nose and bangs and worried brow. In any case II Magnifico was well pleased with two bronze reliefs—of Alexander and Darius—made for him by Verrocchio; he sent them to Matthias Corvinus of Hungary, and engaged the sculptor (1472) to design, in the church of San Lorenzo, a tomb for his father Piero and his uncle Giovanni. Verrocchio carved the sarcophagus in porphyry, and decorated it with bronze supports and wreaths in exquisite floral form. Four years later he cast a boyish David standing in calm pride over the severed head of Goliath; the Signory liked it so much that it placed the statue at the head of the main stairway in the Palazzo Vecchio. In the same year it accepted from him a bronze Boy Holding a Dolphin, and used it as a fountain spout in the courtyard of the palace. At the height of his powers Verrocchio designed, and cast in bronze for a niche on the exterior of Or San Michele, a group of Christ and Doubting Thomas (1483). The Christ is a figure of divine nobility, Thomas is portrayed with understanding sympathy, the hands are finished with a perfection seldom attained in statuary, the robes are a triumph of sculptural art; the whole group has a living and mobile reality.
So obvious was Verrocchio’s superiority in bronze that the Venetian Senate invited him (1479) to come to Venice and cast a statue of Bartolommeo Colleoni, the condottiere who had won so many victories for the island state. Andrea went, made a model for the horse, and was preparing to cast it in bronze when he learned that the Senate was considering the advisability of confining his commission to the horse and letting Vellano of Padua make the man. Andrea, according to Vasari, broke the head and legs of his model and returned to Florence in a rage. The Senate warned him that if he ever put foot on Venetian soil again he would lose his head in no figurative way; he replied that they should never expect him there, since senators were not as skillful as sculptors in replacing broken heads. The Senate thought better of the matter, restored the total commission to Verrocchio, and persuaded him to return at twice the original fee. He repaired the model of the horse, and cast it successfully; but in the process he became overheated, caught a chill, and died within a few days, at the age of fifty-six (1488). In his last hours a rude crucifix was placed before him; he begged the attendants to take it away and bring him one by Donatello, so that he might die, as he had lived, in the presence of beautiful things.
The Venetian sculptor Alessandro Leopardi completed the great statue in so vivid a style, with such mastery of motion and command, that the Colleoni suffered no loss by Verrocchio’s death. It was set up (1496) in the Campo di San Zanipolo—the Field of Sts. John and Paul; and it struts there to this day, the proudest and finest equestrian statue surviving from the Renaissance.
VI. PAINTING
1. Ghirlandaio
Verrocchio’s thriving studio was characteristic of Renaissance Florence—it united all the arts in one workshop, sometimes in one man; in the same bottega one artist might be designing a church or a palace, another might be carving or casting a statue, another sketching or painting a picture, another cutting or setting gems, another carving or inlaying ivory or wood, or fusing or beating metal, or fashioning floats and pennons for a festival procession; men like Verrocchio, Leonardo, or Michelangelo could do any of these. Florence had many such studios, and art students went wild in the streets,27 or lived Bohemianly in the tenements, or became rich men honored by popes and princes as inspired spirits beyond price and—like Cellini—above the law. More than any other city except Athens, Florence attached importance to art and artists, talked and fought about them, and told anecdotes about them,28 as we do now of actors and actresses. It was Renaissance Florence that formed the romantic concept of the genius—the man inspired by a divine spirit (the Latin genius) dwelling within him.
It is worthy of note that Verrocchio’s studio left no great sculptor (except one side of Leonardo) to carry on the master’s excellence, but taught two painters of high degree—Leonardo and Perugino—and one of lesser but notable talent, Lorenzo di Credi. Painting was gradually ousting sculpture as the favorite art. Probably it was an advantage that the painters were uninstructed and uninhibited by the lost murals of antiquity. They knew that there had been such men as Apelles and Protogenes, but few of them saw even the Alexandrian or Pompeian remnants of ancient painting. In this art there was no revival of antiquity, and the continuity of the Middle Ages with the Renaissance was most visible: the line was devious but clear from the Byzantines to Duccio to Giotto to Fra Angelico to Leonardo to Raphael to Titian. So the painters, unlike the sculptors, had to forge through trial and error their own technology and style; originality and experiment were forced upon them. They labored over the details of human, animal, and plant anatomy; they tried circular, triangular, or other schemes of composition; they explored the tricks of perspective and the illusions of chiaroscuro to give depth to their backgrounds and body to their figures; they scoured the streets for Apostles and Virgins, and drew from models clothed or nude; they passed from fresco to tempera and back again, and appropriated the new techniques of oil painting introduced into northern Italy by Rogier van der Weyden and Antonio da Messina. As their skill and courage grew, and their lay patrons multiplied, they added to the old religious subjects the stories of classic mythology and the pagan glories of the flesh. They took Nature into the studio, or betook themselves to Nature; nothing human or natural seemed in their view alien to art, no face so ugly but art could reveal its illuminating significance. They recorded the world; and when war and politics had made Italy a prison and a ruin, the painters left behind them the line and color, the life and passion, of the Renaissance.
Formed by such studies, inheriting an ever richer tradition of methods, materials, and ideas, men of talent painted better now than men of genius had painted a century before. Benozzo Gozzoli, says Vasari in an ungracious moment, “was not of great excellence… yet he distanced all the others of his age in his perseverance; for among the multitude of his works some could hardly help but be good.”29 He began as a pupil of Fra Angelico, and followed him to Rome and Orvieto as assistant. Piero the Gouty recalled him to Florence and invited him to portray, on the walls of the chapel in the Medici Palace, the journey of the Magi from the East to Bethlehem. These frescoes are Benozzo’s chef-d’oeuvre: a stately and yet lively procession of kings and knights in gorgeous robes, of squires, pages, angels, hunters, scholars, slaves, horses, leopards, dogs, and half a dozen Medici—and Benozzo himself slyly introduced into the parade—and all against backgrounds and landscapes marvelous and picturesque. Flushed with triumph, Benozzo went to San Gimignano, and decorated the choir of Sant’ Agostino with seventeen scenes from the life of its patron saint. In the Campo Santo at Pisa he labored for sixteen years, covering vast walls with twenty-one Old Testament scenes from Adam to the Queen of Sheba; some, like The Tower of Babel, were among the major frescoes of the Renaissance. Benozzo diluted his excellence through eager haste; he drew carelessly, made many of his figures depressingly uniform, and crowded his pictures with a confusing multitude of persons and details; but he had in him the blood and joy of life, he loved its lusty panorama and the glory of the great; and the imperfections of his line are half forgotten in the splendor of his color and the enthusiasm of his fertility.