Andrea del Verrocchio

Italian sculptor

• Born: 1435
• Birthplace: Florence (now in Italy)
• Died: October 7, 1488
• Place of death: Venice, Republic of Venice (now in Italy)

Verrocchio was one of the best sculptors of the later part of the fifteenth century and a great favorite of the Medici family. He was able to work in silver, bronze, and terra-cotta as well as marble and was also active as a painter. It was in Verrocchio’s workshop that Leonardo da Vinci received his first training.

Early Life

Andrea del Verrocchio (ahn-DRAY-ah dehl vayr-RAWK-kyoh) was the son of Michele Cione and his first wife, Gemma. He grew up in and spent most of his life in Florence. His father, who was in his fifties when Andrea, his first child, was born, worked as a tilemaker or brickmaker and was a member of the Stoneworkers’ Guild. He owned a home on the Via dell’Angolo in the parish of San Ambrogio as well as some land outside the city. Andrea’s mother evidently died while he was young, for his father remarried and Andrea was reared by his stepmother. In 1452, his father died.

The following year, the eighteen-year-old Verrocchio was involved in an incident in which a man was killed in a scuffle outside the walls of the city. Verrocchio had thrown a stone that hit a young wool worker, who subsequently died of his injuries. Verrocchio was brought before the authorities and charged with homicide, but he was acquitted and the cause of the death was determined to be accidental.

According to his sixteenth century biographer, Giorgio Vasari, Verrocchio was largely self-taught; historians have no certain knowledge of when he received his early training or who his teachers may have been. From 1467 onward, his name appears in the surviving contemporary documents as “del Verrocchio,” and while a seventeenth century source reports that he received his first training in the shop of a goldsmith named Giuliano da Verrocchi, it is now known that he owed his nickname to the fact that in his youth he was a protégé of an ecclesiastic named Verrocchio. In the tax return that he and his younger brother Tommaso filed for the year 1457, he does state that he has been working as a goldsmith but complains that there is no work in this craft and that he has been forced to abandon it. One early source implies that he was trained by Donatello, and while that is possible, modern critics have also suggested that he may have studied or worked with Desiderio da Settignano or Bernardo Rossellino. In 1461, Verrocchio was one of a number of Florentine artists who were asked to furnish designs for the construction of a chapel in the cathedral at Orvieto, but none of the Florentines received the commission.

Life’s Work

Verrocchio emerged as an important artist only in the late 1460’s. His earliest authenticated works are decorative or architectural, and two of them were commissioned by the Medicis, marking the beginning of his long association with that family. The marble, brass, and porphery tombstone for Cosimo de’ Medici in the Church of S. Lorenzo, Florence, was completed in 1467. By 1472, the year in which he was listed as a painter and carver in the records of the Florentine artists’ professional association, the Guild of Saint Luke, he had completed his first major work and one of his most important ones: the tomb of Piero and Giovanni de’ Medici in the Church of S. Lorenzo. Verrocchio employed virtually no figural decoration and no Christian symbolism, but the tomb has a solemn majesty that derives from his characteristic combination of simplicity of design and great richness of detail.

Verrocchio’s famous bronze David in the Museo Nazionale di Bargello in Florence was probably commissioned in the early 1470’s and is certainly one of the earliest of his figural compositions. Like Donatello’s bronze David, it was a Medici commission, but there is an embellishment of the forms that signals the change in Florentine taste toward the richer and more sumptuous taste that marks the late fifteenth century. At about the same time, Verrocchio completed his most popular work, the wonderful bronze Putto with a Dolphin that was part of a fountain in the Medici villa at Careggi. This is a work of great importance for the history of Renaissance sculpture, for it is the first sculpture since antiquity to present equally pleasing views from all sides.

In January of 1467, Verrocchio received the first payments for one of his finest works, the bronze group of Christ and Saint Thomas in the central niche on the east front of the Or San Michele in Florence. The niche had originally been designed for a single figure, and the creation of a two-figure, more than life-size group for the narrow space presented unusual difficulties. Verrocchio was able to solve these problems by making the figures very shallow, a fact of which the spectator is unaware, and by letting the figure of Saint Thomas extend out of the niche toward the viewer. It is possible that the creation and execution of these figures may have occupied him for as long as eighteen years, for they were not placed in the niche until June of 1483.

Verrocchio also carried out several important commissions in marble, of which one of his finest is the half-length Portrait of a Woman , a work that bears a strong resemblance to Leonardo’s Portrait of Ginevra dei Benci. None of his monumental marble works, though, remains in its original condition. The earliest of these was the monument to Francesca Tornabuoni, which was set up in the Church of S. Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, where the Tornabuoni family of Florence had a chapel. It may have been executed in the late 1470’s, but very little of it remains. Of the monument to Cardinal Niccolò Forteguerri, there are at least some substantial remains, and the original appearance of the work can be partially reconstructed from the large terra-cotta sketch held in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In May of 1476, Verrocchio’s model was chosen from among five competitors by the council of Pistoia, the cardinal’s native city. The monument was to be erected in the Cathedral of Pistoia, but the execution dragged on, and several figures and some of the architectural framework were still not finished when Verrocchio died. The monument was given its present form in the mid-eighteenth century. Verrocchio also was responsible for some of the decoration of the huge silver altar frontal for the altar in the Florentine Baptistery. This masterpiece of the goldsmith’s art was begun in the fourteenth century, and generations of artists had contributed to it. In 1480, Verrocchio completed the silver relief representing The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist , which was placed on the lower right side of the altar.

Verrocchio and his studio regularly produced paintings as well as sculpture, but very few paintings can now be identified as his with any certainty. Of the many half-length Madonnas attributed to him, there is little agreement as to which, if any, are actually by him. The Madonna Enthroned with Saints John the Baptist and Donatus was commissioned from Verrocchio not long before 1478, but much of the execution seems to be by Lorenzo di Credi, who worked with Verrocchio and often collaborated with him. Verrocchio’s best painting, and the only one universally agreed to be his, is the Baptism of Christ , which probably dates from the mid-1470’s. Vasari’s statement that one of the kneeling angels is by Leonardo, who was in Verrocchio’s studio in 1476, is generally accepted. What is clear is that Verrocchio depended heavily on pupils, members of his workshop, and collaborators to produce the paintings that were commissioned from him.

The last years of Verrocchio’s life were devoted to the design of what was to become his masterpiece: the larger-than-life-size Equestrian Statue of Colleoni in Venice. The noted Renaissance soldier Bartolommeo Colleoni of Bergamo had died in 1475 and in his will left funds for a commemorative equestrian statue to be erected in his honor in Venice. Verrocchio’s full-scale model was completed in the summer of 1481, and in 1483 Verrocchio moved to Venice, where he remained until his death in 1488. At the time of his death, no parts of the work had yet been cast, and it was not until 1496 that the work was completed and installed on a high pedestal in the Piazza of SS. Giovanni e Paolo. Although he never lived to see its completion, it is in every way the supreme achievement of his artistic genius.

Significance

Verrocchio’s contribution to the development of monumental sculpture during the Renaissance is a major one. Only Donatello ranks with him. Verrocchio’s workshop was one of the largest and most active in Florence, and in his mastery of all facets of the visual arts he provided a role model for his greatest pupil, Leonardo da Vinci . Leonardo’s conception of the artist as a man of science, versed in all aspects of engineering and anatomy as well as design, owes much to Verrocchio’s example. It would be unfair, however, to see Verrocchio’s achievement primarily in terms of the accomplishments of his best pupil. In his own right, he is one of the most characteristic artists of the Florentine Renaissance. The naturalistic element in his work is very strong, and in this he reflects the dominant ideal of the Florentine artist of his day: fidelity to nature. All aspects of the natural were to be studied and understood, but for Verrocchio this naturalism was never an end in itself. Instead, it was the means by which he could create a perfect and untarnished world of forms and ideal types.

Verrocchio’s contemporaries fully appreciated this aspect of his work. One of them noted that his head of Christ in the group of Christ and Saint Thomas was thought to be “the most beautiful head of the Saviour that has yet been made.”

His masterpiece, the monument to Colleoni, shows how effectively he was able to balance these two tendencies. It is a work of enormous power, and the violent and aggressive twist of the rider’s body gives a sense of tremendous energy waiting to be unleashed. To achieve this effect, Verrocchio has twisted the figure to the limits of human possibility. Similarly, the brutal face is an unflinching delineation of a type, not an individual, but it is rendered so plausibly that it seems more vital than any portrait. No fifteenth century artist better exemplified the artistic ideals of the era.

Bibliography

Brown, David Alan. Leonardo da Vinci: Origins of a Genius. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998. The first two chapters of this study of Leonardo deal directly with Verrocchio, his workshop, and his influence on Leonardo. Includes illustrations, bibliographic references, and index.

Bule, Steven, Alan Phipps Darr, and Fiorella Superbi Gioffredi, eds. Verrocchio and Late Quattrocento Italian Sculpture. Firenze, Italy: Le Lettre, 1992. Collection of papers presented at two conferences marking the quincentenary of Verrocchio’s death. Includes illustrations, bibliographic references, and index.

Butterfield, Andrew. The Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997. Comprehensive study of the sculpture, utilizing sources and technical data not previously available. Discusses the practical aspects of Verrocchio’s creations, both technical and financial, as well as his style and iconography. Includes color illustrations, bibliographic references, and index.

Covi, Dario A. “Four New Documents Concerning Andrea del Verrocchio.” Art Bulletin 48 (1966): 97-103. New and important documents dealing with the life of the artist and his work.

Passavant, Günter. Verrocchio: Sculptures, Paintings, and Drawings, Complete Edition. Translated by Katherine Watson. London: Phaidon Press, 1969. The best general modern survey. The text covers all aspects of Verrocchio’s work, and there is a catalog of the sculptures, paintings, and drawings, which the author believes to be authentic, as well as information on rejected works.

Pope-Hennessy, John. Italian Renaissance Sculpture. London: Phaidon Press, 1958. The best general introduction to the field of Italian Renaissance sculpture, with extensive coverage of the major masters. The short article on Verrocchio is an excellent summary of his work as a sculptor, and there are catalog entries of his major works.

Seymour, Charles, Jr. The Sculpture of Verrocchio. Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1971. The best catalog of Verrocchio’s sculpture. Contains notes on the principal works, an appendix of documents with translations, and a partial translation, with some explanatory notes, of Vasari’s biography of the artist.

Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. Translated by Gaston du C. de Vere. Vol. 3. Reprint. New York: Abrams, 1979. The standard translation of the second edition of Vasari’s biography of the artist, published in 1568. This is the only nearly contemporary biography of the artist, written twenty years after the death of Verrocchio. While it is not a reliable source for dates or attributions, it contains a wealth of information available in no other source.

Verrocchio, Andrea del. Verrocchio and the Renaissance Atelier. Translated by Susan Herbstritt. Firenze, Italy: Pagliai Polistampa, 2001. This exhibition catalog is part of the Leonardo and Surroundings series. It contains photographs of Verrocchio’s works exhibited in Arezzo in 2001, along with other Renaissance pieces from Tuscany, and includes a discussion of the artist’s relation to the culture of the Tuscan workshops. Bibliographic references.

Wilder, Elizabeth. The Unfinished Monument by Andrea del Verrocchio to the Cardinal Niccolò Forteguerri at Pistoia. Vol. 7 in Studies in the History and Criticism of Sculpture. Northampton, Mass.: Smith College, 1932. Photographs by Clarence Kennedy and appendix of documents by Peleo Bacci. The most thorough study of any of Verrocchio’s works. Includes complete documentation and excellent photographs.