Andrea del Verrocchio

Abstract

Andrea del Verrocchio was a leading artist in Renaissance Italy. Best known today as the teacher of Leonardo da Vinci, Verrocchio was a celebrated artist in his own right. Born in Florence c. 1435 to a family of artisans and laborers, Verrocchio spent most of his career in that city. He died in Venice in 1488, two years after he had moved there to make a bronze equestrian monument of the mercenary general Bartolommeo Colleoni. Verrocchio worked in an unusually wide variety of media. In sculpture he produced works in marble, wood, bronze, terracotta, and wax. He was also a draftsman, painter, and goldsmith. Most studies on the artist tend to focus on his art in sculpture and few consider his work in different media in dialogue. Yet the artist frequently used the tools and techniques from one medium in another. A closer look at Verrocchio’s tendency to work between and across media reveals an artist who is among the most experimental in 15th-century Florence, itself a major European center of artistic innovation. Verrocchio influenced many of the leading artists of the next generation, especially painters, some of whom trained with him. These included Leonardo da Vinci, Pietro Perugino, and Domenico Ghirlandaio, among many others. Verrocchio initiated many formal, stylistic, and technical innovations that were taken up by artists of the next generation and in succeeding centuries. His Christ and Saint Thomas shows the figures in dynamic and carefully choreographed poses. Thomas is positioned on a step outside the niche in which Christ is placed and turns to reach forward as if to touch Christ’s wound but does not. The careful placement of the figures in relation to each other and to the niche around them anticipates formal developments taken up by Baroque artists, such as Gianlorenzo Bernini. Verrocchio’s Putto with a Dolphin has an equally dynamic pose, with the putto positioned so that it spirals around a central axis, its twisting body inviting the viewer to move around it. This pose came to be known as figura serpentinata (literally “serpentine figure”), a compositional device of enormous influence adopted by leading artists of the sixteenth century, including the painter Leonardo and the sculptor Giambologna. Verrocchio recognized the tonal potential for drawing in black chalk and used it to create areas of sfumato (areas of smokiness) in his drawings, a technical innovation commonly attributed to his pupil Leonardo.