Leonardo: Discoveries from Verrocchio’s Studio, Early Paintings and New Attributions by yaleartgallery

leonardo Discoveries from Verrocchioâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Studio

leonardo

leonardo Discoveries from Verrocchioâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Studio Early Paintings and New Attributions

laurence kanter With contributions by Bruno Mottin and Rita Piccione Albertson

yale university art gallery New Haven distr ibuted by yale university pr ess New Haven and London

Publication made possible by the Robert Lehman Foundation. First published in 2018 by the Yale University Art Gallery 1111 Chapel Street P.O. Box 208271 New Haven, CT 06520-8271 artgallery.yale.edu/publications and distributed by Yale University Press 302 Temple Street P.O. Box 209040 New Haven, CT 06520-9040 yalebooks.com/art Published in conjunction with the exhibition Leonardo: Discoveries from Verrocchio’s Studio, organized by the Yale University Art Gallery. Yale University Art Gallery June 29–October 7, 2018 Copyright © 2018 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Tiffany Sprague, Director of Publications and Editorial Services Christopher Sleboda, Director of Graphic Design Proofreaders: Madeline Kloss Johnson and Stacey A. Wujcik Set in Thesaurus Printed at GHP in West Haven, Conn. ISBN 978-0-300-23301-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018935052 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Jacket illustrations: ( front) Detail of Kanter, fig. 44; (back) Detail of Kanter, fig. 20 Frontispiece: Detail of Kanter, fig. 33 p. 8: Detail of Kanter, fig. 3; p. 102: Detail of Kanter, fig. 1, and Mottin, “The Annunciation,” fig. 1; p. 118: Detail of Kanter, fig. 10, and Albertson, fig. 1; p. 130: Detail of Kanter, fig. 1, and Mottin, “The Annunciation,” fig. 1

Contents 6 Directorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Foreword 7 Acknowledgments

Leonardo da Vinci, Pupil of Andrea del Verrocchio laurence kanter 103

The Annunciation: A Technical Study bruno mottin 119

A Miracle of Saint Donatus of Arezzo: A Technical Study rita piccione albertson 131

Some Conclusions on The Annunciation and A Miracle of Saint Donatus of Arezzo bruno mottin

144 Photo Credits

Leonardo da Vinci, Pupil of Andrea del Verrocchio laurence kanter

in 1936 kenneth clar k, then director of the National Gallery in London, was invited to deliver the Ryerson Lectures at Yale University. His subject was Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), and the lectures he prepared formed the basis of a monograph on the artist that he published in 1939—one of the most elegant and indeed moving books on an Italian artist ever written in English.1 Combining an unusual visual sensitivity and wide-ranging intellectual curiosity with lucid critical analysis and masterful prose, Clark created an image of the artist that reigned in the imaginations of students and scholars—and of the wider public—for more than two generations. It was Clark’s profile of the artist that was regularly tested by new attributions, revisions to chronology, reinterpretations of Leonardo’s drawings or of passages in his notebooks, and the introduction of technical evidence not available to earlier scholarship. The profile proved resilient, a testament to its essential soundness but, ironically, also a barrier to progress, for like all historical studies, even the most brilliant, it was based on the cumulative knowledge to which Clark had access and on all the biases and prejudices this knowledge presupposed. Details have been modified and specific judgments have been challenged, but the Leonardo familiar to us today is very little different from the artist born in a Yale lecture hall in 1936. In hindsight, it is perhaps puzzling that Clark did not better appreciate some of the contradictions into which he was led by relying too trustingly on received wisdom. One outstanding example occurs near the conclusion of his chapter describing the young painter’s accomplishments as a pupil in the studio of Andrea del Verrocchio (1435–1488), and

his first independent efforts in Florence before leaving for Milan in or around 1482: One picture of this period remains to be discussed, the small Annunciation in the Louvre. It is a work of unusual perfection. Unlike the Annunciation in the Uffizi, it is composed with complete mastery of spatial intervals. The handling is precise but sensitive, and some passages, such as the angel’s wing, show real penetration. In fact, we can praise it more unreservedly than any other of Leonardo’s works of this period, and having done so, it may seem paradoxical to doubt its authenticity.2 Clark was here acknowledging a discovery that had been made only a few years earlier, identifying the Annunciation in the Musée du Louvre, Paris (fig. 1), as part of the predella to an altarpiece documented as a commission to Leonardo’s teacher, Andrea del Verrocchio, and supposedly executed by his fellow pupil, Lorenzo di Credi (1457/59–1536). For Clark, “The Louvre Annunciation is thus in the position of a beautiful orphan who is suddenly discovered to have a number of undesirable relations.” 3 Subsequent scholars found it easier to dismiss Clark’s enthusiasm than to allay his doubts. The Louvre panel and a companion painting now in the Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts (see fig. 10), of which Clark had said merely that it “has no great charm,” 4 gradually but steadily were reduced to the status of historical marginalia. How is it possible to progress so rapidly from “unusual perfection” that we “can praise . . . unreservedly” to a pictorial

Fig. 1. Leonardo da Vinci, The Annunciation, ca. 1475–79. Oil on panel, 16.2 × 60.7 cm (6 3⁄8 × 23 7⁄8 in.). Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. no. m.i. 598

Fig. 2. Andrea del Verrocchio, David with the Head of Goliath, ca. 1475. Bronze, h. 126 cm (49 in.). Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence, inv. no. 450, 451

afterthought? Clark’s observations throughout his book are uniformly perspicacious and confidence-inspiring. Standing before the Annunciation at the Louvre, where it is exiled to a glass case filled with small fifteenth-century Florentine, Sienese, Umbrian, and Emilian panels of notable quality but relatively minor distinction, there is no reason to think his assessment of this small jewel was unwarranted. Perfect is the only word that comes quickly to mind. This catalogue and its accompanying exhibition, arising from an opportunity to reunite the Louvre and Worcester panels, seek to recalibrate the arguments over attributions to Leonardo’s early career by restoring the primacy of visual evidence. A number of assumptions and prejudices that have gone too long unquestioned are reconsidered here, and documents, so few of which survive, are reviewed not for what they say but for how they have been interpreted, or possibly misinterpreted. The arguments brought forward treat three different but closely interdependent topics: Have we properly identified the works produced by Leonardo as an associate in Verrocchio’s studio? What did Leonardo learn from Verrocchio, and did he have a pre-career as a student that has not yet been recognized? Finally, given that nearly everything we can identify as having emerged from Verrocchio’s studio is collaborative, how can we isolate Verrocchio’s own artistic personality and, in so doing, see more clearly who the young Leonardo really was? Andrea del Verrocchio is esteemed by students of Italian Renaissance art as one of the period’s great polymaths: a sought-after goldsmith, an accomplished painter, and a towering figure in fifteenth-century Florentine sculpture. Perhaps not as well known as his precursor, Donatello (ca. 1386–1466), or his successor, Michelangelo (1475–1564), he nevertheless left nearly as powerful an imprint as they did, both in his native city and elsewhere, as the author of such iconic masterpieces as the monumental bronze group of Christ and Saint Thomas for the facade of Orsanmichele in Florence (see fig. 67) or the bronze equestrian monument to the condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni in the Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Venice. He was a favorite of the house of Medici, entrusted by them with the execution of the tomb of Cosimo il Vecchio and that of Cosimo’s sons, Giovanni and Piero de’ Medici, in the church of San Lorenzo—both designs of startling originality and elegance—as well as with the casting of the famous bronze figures of David with the head of Goliath (fig. 2), now in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, and the Putto with a Dolphin, in the Palazzo Vecchio. In an often-cited letter of

1481 written by the twenty-nine-year-old Leonardo to the Duke of Milan offering the duke his services as a military and civil engineer, architect, and artist, Leonardo claimed to be well versed in the arts of sculpture.5 Undoubtedly this claim was true and these skills were learned, or at least honed, in Verrocchio’s studio, but we have no idea what a work of sculpture by Leonardo might look like and therefore no means of ascertaining the nature or degree of his possible debt to Verrocchio. That Verrocchio was also a painter—presumably of some renown—is attested by documents, yet because of the nature of his reliance on studio assistants we are left without a clear picture of Verrocchio’s own painting style, so that once again, charting the paths of influence from master to pupil is confusing. What little reliable evidence exists tends to imply that by the time Leonardo can be recognized as an independent artist—conventionally assumed by scholars to have been sometime around 1472, when he was twenty years old—he had mastered a technique of painting in oils radically unlike anything Verrocchio is believed to have used. If he did not learn the rudiments of his technique from Verrocchio, what did he learn? That Leonardo must have had an earlier career as a student that we have not yet been able to characterize is self-evident: his teenage years are entirely undocumented visually, but his supposed first works can only have been the result of assiduous training and a wealth of earlier experience.

z the question of leonar do’s or igins as an artist barely concerned his early biographers. Giorgio Vasari—whose Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori was first published in 1550 and became the source for much of the writing about Leonardo, both fabulist and factual, that appeared over the next four centuries— set the tone by declining to acknowledge that so sublime a genius could owe much to any merely mortal teacher: The greatest gifts are often seen, in the course of nature, rained by celestial influences on human creatures; and sometimes, in supernatural fashion, beauty, grace, and talent are united beyond measure in one single person, in a manner that to whatever such an one turns his

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

Fig. 3. Andrea del Verrocchio and Leonardo da Vinci, The Baptism of Christ, ca. 1470–75. Oil and tempera on panel, 177 × 151 cm (69 3⁄4 × 59 1⁄2 in.). Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence, inv. no. 8358

laurence kanter

Fig. 4. Detail of fig. 3

attention, his every action is so divine, that, surpassing all other men, it makes itself clearly known as a thing bestowed by God (as it is), and not acquired by human art. This was seen by all mankind in Leonardo da Vinci.6 Vasari did report that Leonardo was apprenticed by his father, Ser Piero da Vinci, in the workshop of the renowned sculptor and painter Andrea del Verrocchio, but as if to forestall any question of what he might have learned there and instead demonstrate the self-evident truth of his opening panegyric, he adduced an anecdote of Leonardo as a young boy painting alongside his master, adding the figure of an angel and some draperies to Verrocchio’s altarpiece of the Baptism of Christ for the church of San Salvi in Florence (fig. 3): “ . . . and although he was but a lad, Leonardo executed it in such a manner that his angel was much better than the figures of Andrea; which was the reason that Andrea would never again touch colour, in disdain that a child should know more than he.” 7 For two hundred and fifty years, this story served as the entire first chapter of Leonardo’s career, and the chapter remained just that: a story. The San Salvi Baptism had been lost to view—it was transferred from the Vallombrosan convent of San Salvi to the sister convent of Santa Verdiana—so that the plausibility of Vasari’s contention could neither be confirmed nor used to add other paintings to an inventory of the artist’s

early efforts. Following the rediscovery of the altarpiece in Santa Verdiana in 1810 and its transfer to the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence (it was moved to the Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence, in 1919), Leonardo’s angel became iconic as his popular fame grew. Few if any have ever doubted the essential facts of Vasari’s story—the differences between the two angels (fig. 4) in the San Salvi Baptism are so palpable as to be unmistakable. One, facing forward and looking out of the picture toward the left, is drawn with concision and is smoothly modeled in a traditional tempera technique, with small, individual strokes of color juxtaposed alongside each other to achieve a variety of cream, rose, and gray tones in the flesh and more saturated local color in the draperies. Each hair on the angel’s head, it seems, is patiently delineated in a delightful pattern of repeated curls. The drapery folds are suggestive of volumes but are not descriptive of the weight and movement of fabrics, and each is rendered with an identical progression of tone up to a highlight of pure color or down to a deep shadow of black. The other angel, Leonardo’s, glancing adoringly up at the figure of Christ and seen from behind in three-quarter profile, is painted in oils with all the increased capacity for blending colors and simulating light effects permitted by that medium. The highlights painted in his eyes or on the glass beads sewn to his collar convey the impression not only of their spherical form but also of their translucency. The gold

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

Fig. 5. Detail of fig. 3

threads on his sleeve or the waving ranks of curls in his hair are not delineated so much as captured as they break into or fall out of the light glancing across them. The folds of his cloak betray the tension of the material as it follows the turn of the angel’s shoulders. Color in the angel’s face is employed to indicate warm and cool flesh tones, gently excavated pockets of cast shadow or reflected highlights, and even the glistening moisture of the angel’s lips. The differences between these two figures represent not only the potential characteristics of two different painting media but also the unbridgeable gulf between two artistic intelligences—one of which is more subtle than any that had appeared in Western art up to that point. It was not until the last third of the nineteenth century that the Baptism as a whole was examined more closely, its historical importance analyzed, and Vasari’s anecdote questioned in some of its detail, with scholars seizing upon several weaknesses in its interpretation. Gaetano Milanesi, for example, noted that it is scarcely believable that Verrocchio would actually have ceased painting after seeing this evidence of the surpassing excellence of his pupil since, on the one hand, this could not have been the first chance he had had to see Leonardo paint and, on the other, the Verrocchio studio remained open for painting commissions at a presumably later date.8 Some scholars noted that Leonardo was responsible for more than just the angel in this painting and further suggested that his contribution to the Baptism might not have been

laurence kanter

supplied while he was a student, as the distant landscape he painted there (fig. 5) actually looks more like his mature efforts than do the backgrounds of two other paintings that had by then come to be accepted as his, the Ginevra de’ Benci (fig. 6), then in the Liechtenstein Collection, now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. , and the large Annunciation (fig. 7) from San Bartolomeo a Monte Oliveto, now in the Uffizi.9 If this were so, if the Baptism fell at a midpoint rather than at the beginning of the relationship between the two artists, two questions rise immediately to mind: What might some of Leonardo’s earlier opportunities at collaboration with Verrocchio have comprised? And, did Leonardo continue to work alongside Verrocchio or alongside Verrocchio’s other assistants on later commissions? Twentieth-century scholarship has offered some proposals to address and refine these questions, although, as with all issues concerning the mysterious genius of Leonardo, arriving at a consensus of opinion has proven elusive. Technical research undertaken during cleaning of the San Salvi Baptism altarpiece in the 1990s, for example, has been able to demonstrate that the angel at the left is indeed not the only passage in that altarpiece due to Leonardo: the same oil medium and lead white preparatory layer present in that figure were detected in the figure of Christ (other than His loincloth) as well, while those portions of the altarpiece reputedly by Verrocchio are painted entirely in tempera over a darker preparatory ground. Leonardo also revised the riverbed and distant landscape in oil paints atop an original tempera

Fig. 6. Leonardo da Vinci, Ginevra de’ Benci, ca. 1475–78. Oil on panel, 59.7 × 57.8 cm (23 1⁄2 × 22 3⁄4 in.). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Alisa Mellon Bruce Fund, inv. no. 1967.6.1.a

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

Fig. 7. Leonardo da Vinci, The Annunciation, ca. 1472–74. Oil and tempera on panel, 98 × 217 cm (38 5⁄8 × 85 1⁄2 in.). Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence, inv. no. 1618

laurence kanter

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

Fig. 8. Andrea del Verrocchio, Leonardo da Vinci, and Lorenzo di Credi, The Madonna di Piazza, ca. 1475–85. Oil on panel, 196 × 197 cm (77 1⁄8 × 77 1⁄2 in.). Cathedral of San Zeno, Pistoia, Chapel of the Sacrament

laurence kanter

rendering presumably by Verrocchio, whose own landscape contributions remain visible only in the rock formations beneath the angels at the left and behind the Baptist at the right.10 The fact that Verrocchio was still painting in tempera at a time when Leonardo was fully conversant in a sophisticated oil technique implies that someone else taught Leonardo to paint in oils if, indeed, he was not self-taught. But was Leonardo in command of an accomplished oil technique from the moment he entered Verrocchio’s studio? Is it not logical to presume that he would first have been taught to master tempera as a medium? What might a Leonardo painting in tempera look like? The answer to these questions, of course, is bound up with an even more perplexing corollary: what does a Verrocchio painting in tempera look like? None of the many answers to that fundamental question that have been proposed over the past century and a half has gained universal acceptance.11 At the core of the problem is the nearly complete absence of fully documented works. Verrocchio’s activity as a painter is alluded to in literary sources, but whereas his work as a sculptor is familiar to all students of Florentine Renaissance art, his identity as a painter remains fugitive. Three altarpieces—the San Salvi Baptism, the Madonna di Piazza in Pistoia, Italy (fig. 8), and the Virgin and Child with Five Saints and Two Angels from San Domenico a Maglia (fig. 9), now in Budapest—are associated with his name either directly by documents or in Vasari’s Vite, but these are now attributed to four different painters, including Leonardo. Perhaps another dozen private devotional paintings have at one time or another been thought to be by Verrocchio, but these have garnered a bewildering cacophony of opinions scarcely useful even to catalogue in footnotes. Where a lack of consensus has resulted in a liminal artistic identity for Verrocchio as a painter, it has also bred the assumption that an unprecedentedly large number of artists passed through his studio, either as apprentices or as occasional collaborators, leading to the general belief that he was the most influential artist of his generation. It would follow, therefore, that successfully recognizing what Verrocchio may actually have painted could be an exercise of some consequence.

z in a document of november 1485, we learn that the altarpiece commonly known as the Madonna di Piazza, intended

for an oratory chapel annexed to the cathedral of Pistoia and now installed in the Chapel of the Sacrament there, had previously been commissioned from Andrea del Verrocchio and was at that date all but complete (“la quale si dice essere facta o mancarvi pocho”). The document further states that the altarpiece would have been completely finished more than six years earlier (“è più di sei anni l’harebbe finita”) if the executors had paid the entire sum they owed for it.12 The reference here is to the executors of the estate of Bishop Donato de’ Medici, who had endowed the oratory chapel by testamentary bequest. As Donato de’ Medici died in December 1474, it has been assumed that the altarpiece—which portrays the Virgin and Child enthroned between Saints John the Baptist and Donatus of Arezzo, the bishop’s name saint—was commissioned in or around 1475. If the wording of the document is taken at face value, it can be inferred that the painting was essentially completed by 1478 or 1479, and that whatever details were lacking would have been supplied just before it was delivered to Pistoia, in or after 1485. Vasari mentions “una Nostra Donna in una tavola, molto ben condotta, la quale è a canto alla chiesa grande di San Iacopo di Pistoia” (“a Madonna in a very well-executed panel, which is beside the great Church of San Jacopo at Pistoia”) in his list of works by Lorenzo di Credi—Verrocchio’s preferred pupil after Leonardo’s departure for Milan, left in charge of the Florentine studio when Verrocchio moved to Venice and ultimately named Verrocchio’s heir.13 Consequently, Lorenzo’s name has been associated with the painting ever since, with varying degrees of emphasis. Those scholars who believe the painting had been brought to a more or less advanced state of completion in the late 1470s by Verrocchio and his pupils—among whom may have been Leonardo—assume that Lorenzo, who was born either in 1457 or 1459 and might thus have been fewer than sixteen years old when the altarpiece was commissioned, contributed only finishing touches in or after 1485.14 Those who wish to attribute the painting entirely or predominantly to Lorenzo are forced to date its entire execution to after 1485 and interpret the wording of the document as hyperbole, discounting any substantial prior intervention by Verrocchio beyond the general design of the composition. The significance of this division of opinion extends beyond discussion of the painting now in Pistoia. The 1485 document does not describe the altarpiece in detail, and it cannot therefore confirm the identification of two predella panels that originally stood beneath it, but as one of these (fig. 10), now in the Worcester Art Museum, represents a miracle

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

Fig. 9. Andrea del Verrocchio (with Biagio d’Antonio?), Virgin and Child with Five Saints and Two Angels, ca. 1465–70. Tempera and gold on panel, 168 × 177.5 cm (66 1⁄8 × 69 7⁄8 in.). Szépművészeti Múzeum, Budapest, inv. no. 1386

laurence kanter

of Saint Donatus of Arezzo, its relationship to the Pistoia altarpiece may be taken as a certainty.15 The Worcester panel portrays an event described in the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine. Before leaving his home, a tax collector, Eustatius, entrusted a large sum of money to his wife, Euphrosyne, who hid it for him. Upon his return sometime later, Eustatius found that his wife had died and he, being unable to find the hiding place she had chosen, was condemned for the theft of the money he had entrusted to her. The location of the money, and thus the salvation of the tax collector, was revealed to Saint Donatus as he prayed at Euphrosyne’s tomb. In the Worcester panel, Saint Donatus is kneeling in prayer at the right in the portico of a palatial building with an expansive landscape behind him. Before him at the left, and portrayed, inexplicably, on a smaller scale despite being placed notionally further in the foreground, is the tax collector Eustatius. One knee to the ground, he gestures to Saint Donatus with his left hand and, with his right, points to a hole, the hiding place of the tax revenues revealed by the stone slab that now sits beside it. The other panel associated with the Pistoia altarpiece— as the center of its predella—is the small Annunciation in Paris (see fig. 1), which entered the collections of the Louvre in 1863 and has long figured in discussions of Leonardo’s early career in Florence.16 Once their provenance as parts of the Pistoia altarpiece was established, the contentious division of opinion that surrounds all questions of attribution to Leonardo da Vinci quickly overtook the Louvre Annunciation and the Worcester Miracle of Saint Donatus as well: for much of their modern history they have been dismissed along with the Pistoia altarpiece as works by Lorenzo di Credi. Debate continues to swirl around the Louvre panel. Is the sweeping perspective of the garden wall and portico benches that frame the narrative an entirely original compositional device or an inexpertly realized substitute for the architecture in Leonardo’s Annunciation from San Bartolomeo (see fig. 7)? Is the brilliant variety of detail and range of color in the feathers of the angel’s wings (fig. 11) or the botanical accuracy of the flowers in the meadow in which he kneels (see Mottin, “The Annunciation,” fig. 11) a distraction from the narrative or an essential aspect of its organization? Framed in these terms, it is clear that this debate focuses primarily on judgments of whether the Louvre Annunciation is “good enough” to be by Leonardo, not on whether it actually looks like any other painting by Lorenzo di Credi. In fact, not only does it show little correspondence, if any, with Lorenzo’s figure,

landscape, or drapery style from any point in his relatively well-documented career, but its composition also bears no relation to versions of the subject unquestionably attributable to Lorenzo (fig. 12). For many scholars, Lorenzo di Credi is not an independent personality so much as he is a category: paintings clearly Florentine (not Milanese) and Leonardesque but not by Leonardo must, ipso facto, be by Lorenzo. The roots of this sweeping generalization lie in Vasari’s assertion that “since Lorenzo took an extraordinary pleasure in the manner of Leonardo, he contrived to imitate it so well that there was no one who came nearer to it than he did in the high finish and thorough perfection of his works.”17 Unfortunately, this critique has been repeated so often that it has assumed the status of fact and has led to a great deal of murky, circular argument. Is the Louvre Annunciation merely Leonardesque, not by Leonardo? It seems incredible to think that any other Florentine painter, much less the charming but pedantic and unimaginative Lorenzo di Credi, could have designed or executed this miniature masterpiece. The stunning precision of its perspective setting is dependent for its success at least as much upon the atmospheric effects of softly cast shadows and reflected highlights as it is upon the rigorous plotting of converging orthogonals. These atmospheric effects, which extend throughout the landscape background, are achieved through the expert manipulation of an oil medium apparently beyond the capacity of any Florentine painter at this date other than Leonardo. They reveal an interest in optical empiricism that is entirely and exclusively a hallmark of his mind, no less so than is his unique proficiency at creating the illusion of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. The angel in the Louvre Annunciation has been criticized as unattractive, but the persuasive spatial illusion of his red draperies and of the Virgin’s blue mantle spreading out on the ground around them, and the tactile immediacy of the diaphanous cloth cascading down from the Virgin’s lectern, are inescapably recognizable as effects of which Leonardo alone was capable. At no point in his career, early or late, did Lorenzo di Credi ever rise to this level of accomplishment. His imitations of Leonardo—such as the Madonnas in Dresden (fig. 13) and in Ajaccio, France (fig. 14), are to a certain degree literal, but never do they amount to more than the repetition of patterns reduced to schematic, two-dimensional forms. To what degree can any of the inspiring characteristics of the Louvre Annunciation be recognized in the Worcester panel as well? It is imperative, first of all, to realize that the

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

Fig. 10. Leonardo da Vinci and Lorenzo di Credi, A Miracle of Saint Donatus of Arezzo, ca. 1475–85. Oil on panel, 16.2 × 33.5 cm (6 3⁄8 × 13 3⁄16 in.). Worcester Art Museum, Mass., Theodore T. and Mary G. Ellis Collection, inv. no. 1940.29

laurence kanter

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

Fig. 11. Detail of fig. 1

laurence kanter

Fig. 12. Lorenzo di Credi, The Annunciation, ca. 1500. Oil on panel, 42.5 × 61.5 cm (16 3⁄4 × 24 1⁄4 in.). Alana Collection, Newark, Del.

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

Fig. 13. Lorenzo di Credi, Virgin and Child, ca. 1480. Oil on panel, 37 × 27 cm (14 5⁄8 × 10 5⁄8 in.). Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, Germany, inv. no. 13

laurence kanter

Fig. 14. Lorenzo di Credi, Virgin and Child, ca. 1485–90. Oil on panel, 58 × 39 cm (22 7⁄8 × 15 3⁄8 in.). Palais Fesch, Museé des Beaux-Arts, Ajaccio, France, inv. no. m.f.a. 852.1.703

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

Worcester panel is not a monolithic work of art; it is not homogeneous in all its parts either aesthetically or technically, as Rita Piccione Albertson documents in her essay in the present catalogue. The beautifully conceived figure of Saint Donatus (fig. 15), kneeling in three-quarter profile along a plotted diagonal receding to the right, with the pleated folds of his cope spreading convincingly around him on the ground, is drawn from a high viewing angle, the line of sight established at the saint’s shoulders or higher. The tax collector (fig. 16), by contrast, is shown in pure profile and from a lower viewpoint (waist height). His draperies are entirely schematic in rendering, and they are disposed on the ground before and behind him strictly parallel to the picture surface, belying the notional recession of his right leg, the foot of which is placed slightly backward in space relative to the knee. His torso, arms, and head are drawn on the same scale as those of Saint Donatus, yet his waist, legs, and feet are considerably smaller. Not surprisingly, infrared reflectography (see Albertson, fig. 2) reveals two different systems of underdrawing modeling the drapery folds in these two figures, confirming the intervention of two separate hands. It is a subconscious habit of connoisseurship to test hypothetical attributions at their weakest point to see if they will stand up to direct comparison with the best efforts of the artist under consideration. In this way, the attribution to Lorenzo di Credi that has followed the Worcester panel for most of its known history is reasonable, as the red draperies of the tax collector are completely typical of Lorenzo’s manner, with their schematically designed and rendered folds, their inability to convey a sense of weight, volume, or texture, and their unpersuasive articulation of three-dimensional space. It is also not difficult to imagine Lorenzo as having been responsible for adding the hole in the ground in front of the tax collector (fig. 17), the edges of which do not recede to a perspectival vanishing point but instead splay slightly outward. Very little else in the painting conforms to this pedestrian level of expectation, however, and renewed attention to the paint surface of the Worcester panel reveals a much more solid relationship to the Louvre Annunciation than has generally been acknowledged. The landscapes in both panels, for example, are nearly identical in conception and execution. The effects of a warm, raking light breaking across the folds of Donatus’s cope (see fig. 15), picking out the briefest of highlights in its yellow lining, are both a tour de force of naturalistic observation and a device that enables the artist to convey the

laurence kanter

motion of the saint in the act of leaning forward by simulating the weight of the fabric breaking upon the ground just in front of his knees. No less brilliant are the confident streaks of highlight in the bishop’s sleeves and tunic, the gratuitous spot of light picking out his left thumb as it emerges from the shadow cast by his hands, or the sensuous valleys of shadow and reflected highlights in his plum-colored cope, lent an iridescent sheen by the abrasion over time of surface layers of azurite, exposing a layer of brown underpaint beneath. Are these characteristics evidence of Leonardo’s intervention in this panel, and if so, was his involvement restricted to the figure of Saint Donatus and the landscape behind him? The head and hands of the tax collector (see fig. 16), which at first sight seem so clumsy, in truth only give this impression due to their outsize proportions relative to the lower half of the body. They are drawn and modeled with a sophistication directly comparable to those of the angel in the Louvre Annunciation (see fig. 1), with the caveat only that modern repaints through a large section of the tax collector’s hair blunt the rich impression of volume and movement it is meant to convey. The simulation of texture in his fur cuffs or the clever placement of folds in his sleeve to render the puckering of the fabric where it is stitched to the shoulder indicate a meticulous observation of realistic details well outside the norm in quattrocento Florence, certainly one out of keeping with Lorenzo’s practice. But is this second artist Leonardo? Could it be Verrocchio, despite the use of an oil medium? Scrutiny of the main panel of the Pistoia altarpiece (see fig. 8) not surprisingly reveals at least as wide a spectrum of quality as is evident in the Worcester Miracle of Saint Donatus, both in ideation and execution. The central foci of the composition, the Christ Child and the Virgin’s blue robe, are incontestably the work of Lorenzo di Credi. To prove the point it should suffice to note the implausible fall of drapery folds on the top step of the dais at the left side of the throne, strictly parallel to the picture plane—in this respect, identical to those of the tax collector in the Worcester panel. At the same time, it is critical to note other aspects of the painting that balance these shortcomings. By way of example only, the slightly gray fabric that covers the Virgin’s left foot, creating an evocative billow around her (invisible) shoe and resting so convincingly in two carefully studied folds on the carpeted dais, must be a remnant of an earlier version of the Virgin’s robe, probably painted by Verrocchio. It is radically unlike the brighter blue robe that covers her lap, legs, and

Fig. 15. Detail of fig. 10

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

Fig. 16. Detail of fig. 10

laurence kanter

right foot, with its fussy but oversimplified pockets of light and shadow and its lack of projection into depth, all typical of Lorenzo’s style. Other details of the painting, notably the landscape background with its shorthand notations of trees and shrubbery, may have been added by Lorenzo, but it is unlikely that he could ever have imagined let alone executed the variegated marble and delicate fluting of the pilasters decorating the Virgin’s throne, the complex foreshortening of the piers and trabeation framing the distant landscape view, or the soft lights and shadows articulating the shell niche above it. Nor is it absolutely clear that the figures of the Baptist and Saint Donatus were not painted instead by Verrocchio or another of Verrocchio’s assistants. While it is true that we do not possess a solid standard of comparison by which to judge Verrocchio’s style or level of accomplishment as a painter, we do have plentiful evidence of Lorenzo di Credi’s, and nothing about either of these figures is persuasively consonant with any of that artist’s later work. If the 1485 document is to be read literally, Lorenzo may not yet have reached twenty years of age when the majority of work on the Pistoia altarpiece was in hand and was perhaps barely twenty-six when he was tasked with completing and delivering it. There is no objective reason not to take the 1485

document at face value, other than a desire to accommodate a greater role for Lorenzo with the credible facts of his biography, an a posteriori argument not supported by visual evidence. In 1476, precisely during the years in which there is strong reason to believe that the Pistoia altarpiece was in progress, Leonardo is documented as residing in Verrocchio’s house when he was cited twice (on April 9 and June 7) in a charge for sodomy.18 Not to look for Leonardo’s intervention in the altarpiece would be a willful oversight. Simply on the basis of historical logic, the burden of proof ought to shift from arguing his presence to demonstrating his absence, and visual evidence can easily be adduced to suggest that he is present here in no small measure. The architectural details just mentioned far transcend precision of draftsmanship to achieve the atmospheric and coloristic brilliance of their spatial effects, and what of the magnificent carpet (fig. 18) covering the steps of the dais on which the Virgin’s throne is set? Did any other painter in fifteenth-century Florence demonstrate an ability to foreshorten abstract decorative forms as brilliantly and from so deliberately low an angle of projection as these, all the while maintaining an unmistakable impression of the soft, warm texture of the carpet? 19 Could anyone else have painted

Fig. 17. Detail of fig. 10

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

Fig. 18. Detail of fig. 8

laurence kanter

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

the astonishing effects of light breaking across the twists and knots in the tasseled fringe projecting over the front edge of the pavement, so like the complicated studies of hair or of water in many of Leonardo’s drawings?20 If details such as these are indicative not of Leonardo’s but of Verrocchio’s direct participation, why does nothing comparable to them appear in the Baptism altarpiece from San Salvi, except in those passages widely accepted as the work of Leonardo?

z whatever the answer to this “riddle,” it is essential to reformulate the question of Leonardo’s training in Verrocchio’s studio in less conventional terms than has been customary. By some estimates, the young Leonardo may have been apprenticed to Verrocchio by his father, Ser Piero da Vinci, as early as age fourteen (in 1466), in conformity with standard practice at the time.21 An even earlier date, around 1464, when Leonardo’s grandfather (by whom he had been raised) died, has also been proposed, on the assumption that Ser Piero might then have taken charge of his son and moved him from Vinci to Florence.22 A date of 1469, when Ser Piero is documented in Florence, has also been advanced, but any proposal for the beginning of Leonardo’s apprenticeship can be based only on inductive reasoning: solid documentation places Leonardo in Verrocchio’s studio only in 1471 and again, as mentioned, in 1476.23 Between these two dates, in 1472, he is listed as a dues-paying member of the artists’ confraternity in Florence and thus, presumably, he was already a fully accredited if not yet independent painter.24 Clearly in 1476 he can no longer have been a pupil or apprentice of Verrocchio in any traditional sense, and it is probably more accurate to think of him at that time as a subcontractor or even as a junior partner. For many early scholars, the distinction between Leonardo the apprentice and Leonardo the collaborator was blurred by Vasari’s assertion that Leonardo was just a boy when he worked on the San Salvi Baptism (see fig. 3). No independent confirmation of this assertion exists; the painting is entirely undocumented. It has been dated as early as the end of the 1460s by some scholars to bring it

laurence kanter

into conformity with the imagined dates of Leonardo’s apprenticeship, and as late as the mid-1470s by others to account for the young artist’s developed mastery of the oil medium.25 In practice, there is no logical impediment to extending this range of dates by some margin in either direction. Nearly all recent scholarship accepts the argument that Leonardo’s contributions to the Baptism cannot be his first securely identifiable efforts as a painter, and that at least the presumed second stage of work on it must follow such patently independent efforts as the Uffizi Annunciation from San Bartolomeo (see fig. 7) or the Madonna of the Carnation in Munich (fig. 19), commonly dated between about 1473 and 1476, and possibly even the Ginevra de’ Benci in Washington (see fig. 6), thought to have been painted between 1475 and 1478.26 In light of this, and of the very tangible possibility of his intervention on the Pistoia altarpiece and its predella between 1475 and 1478 or 1479, it becomes important to consider the possibility that Leonardo’s collaboration on works emerging from Verrocchio’s studio might have been normative, not exceptional. It should be clear from the documents of 1476 that nothing prohibits the possibility of such collaboration at any point after the presumptive end of his apprenticeship in 1472. What might seem a purely theoretical contention may be bolstered by the suggestive evidence of a pair of understudied, indeed rarely viewed, cassone panels in the collection of the Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris.27 Both paintings are unusually large and unusually well preserved for cassone fronts, but that this was indeed their function and that they were not instead spalliera panels—wall decoration meant to be installed as an architectural feature above the wainscoting of a room—is argued by the presence of a recess at the back of each panel, cut in the center of the upper margin, to receive a lock mechanism. The first of the two panels (fig. 20) represents a scene of battle on horseback that has been identified as the Battle of Pydna in 168 b.c., in which the Roman general Lucius Aemilius Paulus defeated the Macedonian armies and brought eleven thousand captives back to Rome. Two opposing cavalries fill the right two-thirds of the composition. At the left, separated from the conflict by a rocky outcrop covered on one face by shrubbery, is a surprising and original vignette of eight mounted knights at rest, sauntering through a beautifully rendered landscape (fig. 21), while another knight in the foreground allows his horse to drink from a streambed before

Fig. 19. Leonardo da Vinci, Madonna of the Carnation, ca. 1473–76. Oil on panel, 62 × 47.5 cm (24 × 18 3⁄4 in.). Alte Pinakothek, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich, inv. no. 7779

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

Fig. 20. Leonardo da Vinci and collaborator, The Battle of Pydna, ca. 1472. Tempera on panel, 51 × 159 cm (20 1⁄8 × 62 5⁄8 in.). Musée Jacquemart-André, Institut de France, Paris, inv. no. mjap-p 1822.1

Fig. 21. Detail of fig. 20

him (fig. 22). The landscape background running across the length of the panel is painted with a filmy, soft-focus simulation of atmosphere fully congruous with the landscapes included by Leonardo in the Louvre Annunciation (see fig. 1) and the San Salvi Baptism (see figs. 3 and 5), and is fundamentally unlike the landscapes conceived or executed by any other Florentine painter of the fifteenth century: it is rivaled in its successful evocation of depth only by the landscapes of Antonio del Pollaiuolo (1431–1498) but studiously avoids their fascination with limitless detail articulating the continuous recession from foreground to great distance. The landscape motifs incorporated in the middle distance at the left are also fully reminiscent of those found in

laurence kanter

the Louvre Annunciation and in the Worcester Miracle of Saint Donatus (see fig. 10), while the reflections of the sky captured in the water of the river, as well as the reflections of the shrubbery along its banks, are certainly worthy of the painter of either of those works or of the Ginevra de’ Benci in Washington (see fig. 6). It should be noted that while Pollaiuolo included similar reflections in his river landscapes, he understood them to be natural to the intrinsic properties of water and did not differentiate their appearance according to their depth in space. In the JacquemartAndré panel, the reflections only occur a certain distance back from the foreground plane, where the viewer’s angle of sight would be sufficiently low to account for this reflectivity. Closer

to the foreground, and at a consequently steeper viewing angle, the water becomes progressively transparent, an empirical observation of optical phenomena astonishing at this period for anyone other than Leonardo. Comparison of the two armies in this painting reveals that it, like the Worcester Miracle of Saint Donatus, is not a homogeneous work. There is a striking contrast between the innovative capacities of one artistic mind working within a conventional format—battle scenes painted on cassone fronts have a long history in Florence and with few exceptions conform to often-repeated formulas—and another employing utterly traditional types in an uninventive representational shorthand.

In the Roman army, advancing from the right (fig. 23), the armor of the cavalry is painted in a flat black reserve with a white outline picking out the visors and the back of the casques; in a few instances, a straight white highlight is added on the epaulette or the arm plates. In the Macedonian army, on the left (fig. 24), each suit of armor is fully modeled with sheets of cascading highlights that feather out or intensify to suggest the volume—not merely the outlines—of the forms they embellish, and the metal they comprise. This attention to realistic detail becomes a coloristic tour de force in the charging foot soldiers in the center foreground (fig. 25). The drawing and modeling of detail in the armor of the knight permitting his horse to drink

Fig. 22. Detail of fig. 20

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

Fig. 23. Detail of fig. 20

laurence kanter

Fig. 24. Detail of fig. 20

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

Fig. 25. Detail of fig. 20

Fig. 26. Detail of fig. 20

from the river (fig. 26) or in that of the knight on horseback in front of the rocky outcrop (fig. 27) are masterpieces of painterly facility notwithstanding their almost miniaturist scale, while a parallel for the introspective melancholy of the former’s features is not to be found anywhere outside the character studies drawn by Leonardo in his early notebooks. The companion panel at the Jacquemart-André, representing the Triumph of Aemilius Paulus (fig. 28), is less dramatic a composition than the Battle of Pydna, but it is certainly no less accomplished in its realization and reveals an equally marked if not greater contrast between levels of imagination and technique from one side of the picture

surface to the other. Once again, the landscape background is uniform across the length of the panel, and once again, it is compelling in the sophistication of the atmospheric effects it successfully evokes—the light-scattering properties of the air suggesting its temperature and humidity, much as they do in the background of the San Salvi Baptism. The details in the left half of the painting of armor, of heads—both of horses and of men—of hats and helmets, even the perspective of the triumphal cart, are paradigms of naturalistic observation. The rendering of the cart at the left, for instance, is a feat of technical virtuosity: the flat gold leaf is engraved and glazed to simulate perfect perspectival recession into depth, freely

laurence kanter

Fig. 27. Detail of fig. 20

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

Fig. 29. Detail of fig. 28

laurence kanter

Fig. 30. Detail of fig. 28

straying from the inscribed underdrawing wherever necessary to refine the illusionistic effects of moldings or decorative embellishments diminishing in scale. Its great notional weight is communicated by the artist having portrayed the three horses pulling the cart as straining forward, two of them with all four feet firmly planted on the ground (fig. 29). The two horses pulling the triumphal cart at the right, by contrast, are cantering lightly as though their burden were weightless, while the cart itself is rendered with a haphazard and totally unsuccessful sense of perspective, adhering rigidly to the uninspired drawing beneath it. The crowd of soldiers pressing in at the city gate at the far right is clumsy and ill-conceived, with heads growing larger rather than smaller as they are shown further back in space. The carved wreath lining the arch of the gate does not diminish in width as it moves from the front to the back of the opening it encloses, and the buildings and column emerging above the wall of the city are so badly proportioned and flatly painted as to lead to the suspicion that a third, even less competent artist may have been responsible for inserting

them. The same is not true of the crenellated turrets punctuating the distant rear wall of the city (fig. 30), which catch the rays of the sun with gentle and sophisticated nuance and must have been painted by the same artist who conceived the landscape of which they are part. Cassone panels, commissioned on the occasion of important patrician marriages, can sometimes be indirectly documented through a study of their heraldry. Painted on the shield of the statue mounted atop the cart at the right in the Triumph of Aemilius Paulus is a coat of arms that has been correctly identified as that of the Mannelli family of Florence.28 No other coat of arms, representing the second family involved in the marriage commemorated by the commission for these chests, appears in either painting. It may have been obliterated or perhaps was never included within the painted scenes: although incorporated by some artists as cryptic patterns within the painted narratives, heraldic devices were frequently relegated to the framing elements of cassone chests and thus were lost when the painted

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

panels were cut out. The Jacquemart-André cassoni have been attributed to Verrocchio and his studio.29 If the logic of the argument advanced here—that they are likely to have been collaborative works with Leonardo da Vinci, whether working within the Verrocchio household or on his own account with different assistants—is followed through, there were only five marriages in the Mannelli family that took place within a plausible range of dates. The bans for two of these were posted in 1473: the marriage of Francesco di Bartolomeo di Niccolò Mannelli to Gemma di Antonio di Messr. Alessandro degli Alessandri and the marriage of Ginevra di Leonardo di Niccolò Mannelli to Girolomo di Giovanni di Silvestro Popoleschi. Three further marriages were clustered a decade later, in 1482 and 1483: the marriage of Ginevra’s brother, Girolamo di Leonardo di Niccolò Mannelli, to Cosa di Piero di Lutuzzo Nasi in 1482; the marriage of Piero di Giovanni di Niccolò Mannelli

Fig. 31. Unknown Florentine(?) artist, Christ on the Cross with Saints Jerome and Anthony Abbot, ca. 1480. Tempera on panel, 115 × 150 cm (45 3⁄8 × 59 1⁄8 in.). Formerly Santa Maria in Organo, Argiano, Italy

laurence kanter

to Gherardesca di Bartolomeo di Zanobi del Giocondo, variously reported as occurring either in 1482 or 1483; and the marriage of Alessandro di Leonardo di Niccolò Mannelli to Margherita d’Alamanno di Bernardo d’Alamanno de’ Medici in 1483.30 No external evidence that could help narrow this list of candidates exists, or has yet been found. The connections of the brides’ families in the last two marriages either to Verrocchio (de’ Medici) or Leonardo (del Giocondo) might incline to favor one of these, but that is entirely circumstantial evidence for which no additional support can be adduced.31 The skirt of the triumphal cart at the left of the Triumph of Aemilius Paulus (see fig. 28), with its amazing fringe of ermine, is emblazoned with a device (in gold on black or perhaps blue) that could be interpreted as a reference to the palle of the Medici family, as is the shield (in gold on red) of at least one soldier in the Battle of Pydna, but

in neither case is the device faithful to the heraldic colors of that family (red on gold). A date of 1483—a moment at the tail end of the fashion for painted cassoni in Florence— could also be problematic as it is not known whether Leonardo left Florence for Milan in 1482 or 1483, but it is also not known how long before a marriage a commission for cassoni was typically placed. On the other hand, an analysis of the paint surface in the Triumph of Aemilius Paulus undertaken in July 2000 concluded that the pigment binder in the painting was egg tempera, a factor that, coupled with the total absence of any passages attributable to Lorenzo di Credi in either panel, would strongly argue in favor of a date of 1473 or shortly before. Is it possible, then, that these two paintings represent the first collaborative works between Verrocchio and Leonardo that can be tied to a reasonably firm date? 32

One example of the second of these misconceptions leading scholarship mildly astray is the altarpiece of Christ on the Cross with Saints Jerome and Anthony Abbot, formerly in the sacristy of the church of Santa Maria in Organo at Argiano, Italy (fig. 31), unfortunately stolen in 1970 and not yet recovered. One of only five paintings accepted by Günter Passavant as works by Verrocchio, it was discussed at length by David Alan Brown as representing the artist’s earliest painting style and an illustration of how “Andrea, once he determined to take up painting, faced the problem of how to translate his own style as a sculptor working mainly in bronze into two dimensions.” 33 This evaluation has not been accepted by all critics and indeed is problematic. Even old black-andwhite photographs (fig. 32) reveal that the Argiano altarpiece was executed in a vigorous and self-confident oil technique entirely at odds with any passages in supposedly later works by Verrocchio like the San Salvi Baptism or the Pistoia

z isolating ver rocchio’s painting style from that of Leonardo or of any of his other pupils and assistants has been hampered as much by unrealistic literary expectations as by the lack of a fully documented body of works from which meaningful observations may be abstracted. Contemporary or near-contemporary testimony of Verrocchio’s activity as a painter combined with better documentation of his work as a sculptor have led to the perpetuation of two fallacies. In the first instance, it is automatically assumed that to be identifiable as a work worthy of attribution to Verrocchio a painting would need to demonstrate the same preeminence of quality relative to the general standard of Florentine late quattrocento paintings as a sculpture by him does within the broader category of Florentine late quattrocento sculpture. This may or may not have been the case, but logically it is a contention that must be proven, not a premise upon which deductions can be based. In the second instance, attempts to find paintings that could be by Verrocchio tend to proceed from an effort to visualize the thought process of a sculptor working in two dimensions, relying, in other words, on interpretation as a basis for identification, rather than on identification as a stimulus for interpretation.

Fig. 32. Detail of fig. 31

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

Fig. 33. Andrea del Verrocchio and Leonardo da Vinci, Virgin and Child with Two Angels, ca. 1468–70. Tempera on panel, 96.5 × 70.5 cm (38 × 27 3⁄4 in.). National Gallery, London, inv. no. ng 296

laurence kanter

altarpiece. Conversely, the altarpiece from San Domenico a Maglia, now in Budapest (see fig. 9), is nearly without exception dismissed as insufficiently accomplished to be by Verrocchio and assigned instead to one of his minor followers, Biagio d’Antonio (1444/46–1516), on the basis of that painter’s frequent use, in his own, highly repetitive commercial output, of figure types initially found there.34 That the altarpiece served as a fertile source for Biagio’s compositions cannot be doubted; that he ever rose to a level of artistic achievement commensurate with having painted this distinguished work is absurd. Biagio may well have labored on this altarpiece in a purely menial capacity during a hypothetical apprenticeship in Verrocchio’s studio—a comparison of two details, the elegant, traced drawing for the hand of the Virgin and the clumsily painted hands of the angels holding a crown above her head,35 suffices to prove that assistants were allowed to execute parts of the surface—and he may well have taken or been given the preparatory drawings for it when he left the studio to strike out on his own. There is, however, no more tangible connection than that between any of his recognized works and the altarpiece in Budapest, and it is incumbent upon us to reintroduce that work into serious discussions of Verrocchio as a painter in his own right. Yet a third complication frustrating the discovery of Verrocchio the painter is the fact that the two altarpieces given to him by Vasari, the San Salvi Baptism and the San Domenico a Maglia Sacra Conversazione, as well as the single work documented as a commission to him—the Pistoia altarpiece— are all collaborative efforts. Given this, it might be prudent to investigate any other painting presumed to have emerged from the painter’s orbit as potentially collaborative rather than as monolithic by default. The recent cleaning at the National Gallery in London of one of the disputed Verrocchio paintings in its collection, the Virgin and Child with Two Angels (fig. 33), forcefully revealed the truth of this assertion.36 One result of the investigation undertaken during the restoration process was the clear differentiation between two artists at work on this panel. The painter responsible for the figures of the Virgin and the lily-bearing angel on the left was conceptually more ambitious and technically more adept than his companion, who was responsible for the Christ Child and the angel supporting Him on the right. It is scarcely possible to characterize the distinction between these two artists better than by quoting the authors of the National Gallery study:

The hand of the angel on the right [fig. 34], who supports the Christ Child, lacks the superb understanding of the underlying anatomy, let alone the expressive elegance, of the hands of the angel on the left [fig. 35]. Instead the fingers seem flaccid and boneless and there is little sense of the structure of the wrist and back of the hand. . . . The eye of the angel on the left [fig. 36] exhibits Verrocchio’s usual economy of technique, and the placement of the catchlights—the dense one on the iris but also those over the white part of the eye—describes brilliantly the glistening spherical surface of the eyeball. The light blue-grey eyes of the angel on the right [fig. 37] are also beautifully painted, but the way that the fine brushstrokes for the white of the eye follow the circumference of the iris, instead of the eye as a whole, indicates a painter who thinks differently about form.37 The only misplaced comment here is the reference to “Verrocchio’s usual economy of technique”—this is an assumption, not a fact. The authors were at pains to demonstrate the superiority of one artist not only over the other that they had isolated but also over any other among the dismissive attributions historically associated with this painting, which has nearly always been recognized as Verrocchiesque but frequently pigeonholed as the work of a follower. Brown, for instance, barely considered the painting in his discussion of Verrocchio’s workshop, having accepted Federico Zeri’s pronouncement that it was likely to be the work of the young Pietro Perugino (ca. 1452–1523).38 For the National Gallery staff, comparison to Verrocchio’s drawings and sculptures suggested not only his authorship but also a date in the mid- to late 1470s, which then permitted them to identify the second, minor hand as that of Lorenzo di Credi (who at that time would have been a teenaged assistant in Verrocchio’s shop). But drawings and sculpture are not an adequate or even admissible basis of comparison for attributions of paintings, let alone for establishing their relative chronology, and all the drawings and sculptures adduced for comparison in this case are themselves attributions and dated by consensus, not by document. Furthermore, while the distinction between the two hands at work on the London painting is indisputable, as is the characterization of one relative to the other, the contention that the weaker of the two could be Lorenzo is only defensible if one accepts his

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

Fig. 34. Detail of fig. 33

laurence kanter

Fig. 35. Detail of fig. 33

Fig. 36. Detail of fig. 33

Fig. 37. Detail of fig. 33

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

Fig. 38. Detail of fig. 33

traditional identification as the “non-Leonardo”—the artist responsible for everything disappointing to earlier Leonardo scholars. Comparison to Lorenzo’s documented or authenticated works reveals no points of contact whatsoever with the London painting. He is fundamentally a planar artist. His repertory of forms and motifs, invariably both derivative and repetitive, is developed from a translation of his models into silhouettes and patterns. The second of the two London artists may have been deficient relative to the first, but “deficiency” is not a defining characteristic of Lorenzo’s art: planarity is, and the second London artist’s imagination was not planar. Nor does comparison of the left half of the London painting to any of the passages in the three altarpieces thought to be by Verrocchio yield positive results; introduction of his name in this context must be understood to signify

laurence kanter

that the quality of the painting is worthy of the head of the studio, nothing more. Once that extraneous assertion is set aside—as it needed to be in the case of the figure of Christ in the San Salvi Baptism—it emerges that the right half of the painting might more suggestively call Verrocchio to mind than does the left. The scintillating play of light over the draperies of the angel on the left (fig. 38), the soft highlights picking out the knuckles and tendons of his hands (see figs. 35 and 38), as well as the glistening break of light across the brocades of the Virgin’s sleeves (fig. 39) and the lining of her blue cloak; the brilliant replication in tempera of the reflective properties and the three-dimensional modeling of the jewels in the brooches of both figures; the astonishing naturalism of the lily held by the angel (fig. 40); and the unprecedentedly simple yet utterly effective sweep of the landscape (which the

Fig. 39. Detail of fig. 33

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

Fig. 40. Detail of fig. 33

laurence kanter

authors of the National Gallery study convincingly argued was due to the artist of the left two figures) into continuously recessive depth are to be found in no other tempera paintings of the Florentine quattrocento but find an absolutely convincing analogue in Leonardo’s earliest oil paintings: the Annunciation from San Bartolomeo a Monte Oliveto (see fig. 7) and the Ginevra de’ Benci (see fig. 6), not to mention his interpolations in the San Salvi Baptism (see fig. 3). Looking again more closely at the manner of modeling and of painting the highlights of the left angel’s eye (see fig. 36) should make an attribution to Leonardo all but a certainty. Like the Jacquemart-André cassone panels, the National Gallery Virgin and Child with Two Angels is painted entirely in tempera and so has only once or twice before been entertained seriously as a possible work by Leonardo in Verrocchio’s studio.39 That Leonardo must have worked in tempera before mastering the technique of oil paints is logical, but few authors have tackled the problem of trying to intuit what this phase of his career as a student might have looked like. A clever and largely persuasive attempt to identify a student exercise by Leonardo was advanced nearly twenty-five years ago by David Alan Brown, when he noticed how much more lively and naturalistic than the rest of the work were the figures of a fish and a curly-haired dog added to another of the often-disputed devotional paintings attributed to Verrocchio, the Tobias and the Angel (fig. 41), by coincidence also in the National Gallery in London.40 Taken on their own, these details are suggestive but not sufficiently compelling: Leonardo was not the only one of Verrocchio’s pupils interested in naturalism—his putative studio mates Perugino and Domenico Ghirlandaio (1448/49– 1494) both built highly successful careers on their mimetic talents—nor was he the only artist in that circle to be interested in curling hair. However, when Brown expanded his argument to take in the highlights on Tobias’s sleeve, which accurately simulate the fall of light across a brocaded fabric (fig. 42), he introduced the salient characteristic of Leonardo’s revolutionary novelty as a painter: optical empiricism. In contrast to the lavish decorative detail of the woven pomegranate pattern in the Archangel Raphael’s sleeve (fig. 43), laboriously describing each thread in the sumptuous fabric, “the design motif [in Tobias’s collar and sleeves] is no longer clearly legible, having been painted illusionistically to suggest how such a brocade, if crumpled, would appear to the eye. . . . [The] pupil’s brushstrokes describe highlights on gold threads, not the threads per se.”41

Fig. 41. Andrea del Verrocchio and Leonardo da Vinci(?), Tobias and the Angel, ca. 1468. Tempera on panel, 83.6 × 66 cm (33 × 26 in.). National Gallery, London, inv. no. ng 781

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

Among painters active in Florence in the 1460s—a reasonable though far from certain presumptive date for this painting—only Antonio del Pollaiuolo shared Leonardo’s interest in reproducing the effects of light as it reflects off surfaces and strikes the eye, and only he was equally interested in creating the successful illusion of space on a two-dimensional surface through accurate drawing and the manipulation of light effects. It may well be that Leonardo was inspired to the pursuit of these ideals by contact with Pollaiuolo, or it may be that his shared interest in these ideals led him, as has often been suspected, to experiment with Pollaiuolo’s oil technique. If so, however, the process of experiment and discovery must have been gradual, not abrupt, as more than just the two paintings in London seem to reveal Leonardo training in tempera alongside his teacher, Verrocchio. The task of seeking out further examples of Leonardo’s youthful but already revolutionary talent leads

directly to another of the disputed group of Verrocchiesque devotional paintings, the Virgin with the Seated Child in Berlin (fig. 44). This painting has always impressed critics as being of conspicuously higher quality than the general standard of the others with which it has been associated.42 Like the London Virgin and Child with Two Angels, quality in this painting is palpable, but it is not evenly distributed across the entire surface and is even further confused in photographic reproduction, due in part to an approximately five-centimeter-wide strip of modern painted additions along all four sides and the modern decoration of the Virgin’s halo. Other than these additions, which compromise the spatial effects of the composition, the painting is in excellent condition, with only minor retouching along a split or join in the center of the panel and small local repairs elsewhere. Once again, close scrutiny of this painting is rewarded by the realization that two different artists were involved in

Fig. 42. Detail of fig. 41

Fig. 43. Detail of fig. 41

laurence kanter

Fig. 44. Andrea del Verrocchio and Leonardo da Vinci, Virgin with the Seated Child, ca. 1468–70. Tempera on panel, 75.8 × 54.6 cm (29 7⁄8 × 21 1⁄2 in.). Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, inv. no. 104a

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

Fig. 45. Detail of fig. 44

its execution. The handling of paint in the figure of the Christ Child, His draperies, the transparent cloth beneath Him, and the Virgin’s fingers and hands supporting Him (fig. 45) is fully consistent with that of the second artist in the London painting, the author of the Christ Child and the supporting angel there. The decorative pattern of the Child’s sash, for example, is painstakingly depicted, but both its distortions of pattern conveying the impression of twisting folds and the simple ridge of highlight along each of those folds are conventional devices rendered with little notable animation or imagination. The same is true of the transparent cloth beneath the Child, while the Virgin’s right hand (the split in the panel and a considerable width of repaint running through two fingers and the back of the Virgin’s left hand make this area of the painting difficult to read conclusively) and both of the Child’s hands are correctly drawn but inadequately modeled to convey

laurence kanter

the extreme foreshortening intended by the artist, and they certainly do not communicate a convincing understanding of bone or muscle structure. Contrasting these passages to the brilliant modeling of the Virgin’s transparent scarf (fig. 46) only points out the weaknesses in the former. Pattern in the scarf is suggested but, as was the case in Tobias’s brocaded sleeve in London (see fig. 42), is frequently blurred or obscured by the paint being “redirected” to the depiction of highlights rather than decoration. The folds of the scarf at the Virgin’s ear, at her temple, and alongside her neck move agitatedly in and out of the raking light and catch the briefest, most momentary flashes of highlight in a breathtaking display of optical naturalism, then fade to a filmy indistinctness across her far shoulder or in places along the hem where the artist wished to suggest the effects of scattering rays of light. The Virgin’s brocaded sleeves are a tour de force of empirical observation,

Fig. 46. Detail of fig. 44

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

enlivened in the left arm (fig. 47) by the animated knots of the laces along its lower edge; like the figure of Tobias in London, those at the elbow are left untied. The Virgin’s head in the Berlin painting is modeled in color as well as value, enriching the sense of three-dimensionality through a nuanced gamut of highlights, shadows, reflected highlights that convey a sense of the temperature of light, and cast shadows. This coloristic ingenuity is pressed to a remarkably inventive extreme where her scarf wraps around the coiled braid of her hair: the warm ochre/brown color of the hair showing through the gauzy white fabric of the veil is abetted by the admixture of a faint lavender tone, an effect that would be perfected in oil paint—where translucency of superimposed layers is more easily controlled—in the robes of Saint Donatus in the Worcester predella (see fig. 15) or of the Virgin in the Louvre Annunciation (see fig. 1). These coloristic experiments are conspicuously absent in the Child’s head in the Berlin painting, where modeling is achieved strictly through application of light and dark to local color. The same contrast divides the two artists active in the London Virgin and

Fig. 47. Detail of fig. 44

laurence kanter

Child with Two Angels. In the head of the angel on the left, color is not merely local but is manipulated as part of the painter’s arsenal for conveying the illusion of three-dimensionality. Like the London painting, the Berlin painting shows a clear and deliberate division of labor that must have been planned from the start. Some passages, such as the Child’s left leg or His arms, were left in reserve for one artist to complete where the other left off. In London, these boundaries of transition enabled the curator and conservator to conclude that the landscape background was in all probability the responsibility of “hand A,” the artist of the two figures on the left. Such a conclusion is not as straightforward in Berlin, where the best that can be said is that the landscape at the right is more spatially persuasive than that at the left. It could perhaps be argued that the greater independence and more extensive responsibilities of “hand A” in London might imply a later date for that painting, but it would be reckless to insist on such a conclusion. A linear chronology based on observations of that nature would be merely intuitive unless it could be linked to other, more objective measurements as well. Less

reckless, on the other hand, is the assertion that the remarkable collaborator—“hand A”—on both the London and Berlin paintings may well have been the young Leonardo da Vinci.

z if we accept that one of the dependable characteristics of Verrocchio’s studio output is collaboration (whether or not we are searching for the young Leonardo da Vinci as a collaborator), it is worthwhile to examine works of sculpture as well as paintings to see if this pattern of production translates from one medium to another. Not surprisingly, it seems to do so. An extreme example of shifts of quality and sculptural competence within a single work of art has long been recognized among the angels and virtues in the marble cenotaph for Cardinal Niccolò Forteguerri in Pistoia, a commission secured by Verrocchio in 1477 but still incomplete upon his death eleven

years later. In this case, however, there is little agreement over whether this range of effects was planned from the beginning as an aspect of collaborative sculptural practice or whether it resulted from Verrocchio’s relinquishing control of the project upon his move to Venice from Florence. A far more subtle but no less demonstrable contrast of sculptural mentalities may be observed in comparing two terracotta reliefs of flying angels in the Louvre (fig. 48), which clearly must have been conceived as a unit. Several writers discussing these two figures have commented on the differences between them; Andrew Butterfield has argued that these differences amount to evidence of distinct artistic personalities rather than willful design conceits on the part of a single artist.43 The angels’ hands, feet, and draperies are differently modeled and differently foreshortened. Their heads and hair reflect different systems of sculptural thinking: the head on the left is built up additively of gently swelling volumes, while that on the right is articulated instead by carefully observed detail engraved into its delicately modeled surface. The angel on the left recalls the assertive physical presence of the figure of

Fig. 48. Andrea del Verrocchio, Two Flying Angels, ca. 1475–80. Terracotta, each 38 × 35 cm (15 × 13 7⁄8 in.). Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. no. th 33–34

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

Fig. 49. Andrea del Verrocchio, Bust of a Lady with Primroses, ca. 1475–80. Marble, 65 × 60 cm (25 5⁄8 × 23 5⁄8 in.). Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence, inv. no. 115

laurence kanter

Saint Thomas in Verrocchio’s bronze group on Orsanmichele (see fig. 67). The angel on the right introduces a pictorial imagination (in the fluttering ribbons and the windblown draperies and wing feathers) and a subtlety of conceiving form in three dimensions that instead recalls the Bust of a Lady with Primroses (fig. 49) in the Bargello, an undocumented work universally ascribed to Verrocchio. Are these two angels by different sculptors? Are they both works by Verrocchio but from different moments in his career? The ambiguity is typical of the elusive character of Verrocchio’s art. An undeservedly little-known marble relief, the Virgin and Child with an Angel (fig. 50) in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, repays close observation with the idea of collaboration in mind. In its overall organization of figures occupying notional space, the composition of this relief is recognizable as a variant, in reverse, of the composition of the London Virgin and Child with Two Angels previously discussed (see fig. 33). Specific figural motifs in the Boston relief are also closely related to another of the disputed attributions to Verrocchio as a painter: the Adoration of the Christ Child (known as the Ruskin Madonna), in the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh (fig. 51).44 Accordingly, the Boston relief was discussed for much of its early history as a work by or from the studio of Verrocchio. It was pronounced a nineteenth-century forgery by John Pope-Hennessy in the 1950s and withdrawn from public view, so that the little discussion of it that appears in art-historical literature since then is based on the evidence of photographic reproductions rather than firsthand observation. The tendency of modern scholarship is to regard the relief (correctly) as a legitimate fifteenth-century work, but to relegate it to the expansive and somewhat amorphous catalogue of sculptures assigned to Francesco di Simone Ferrucci (1437–1493). A sometime collaborator of Verrocchio, Ferrucci has assumed for Verrocchio’s sculptural output the role played by Lorenzo di Credi in Verrocchio’s (or Leonardo’s) painted oeuvre: a catch basin that aggregates a core of documented and stylistically homogeneous works into a larger penumbra of Verrocchiesque efforts deemed to have fallen short of an imagined benchmark of quality.45 It is particularly treacherous to draw definitive conclusions for sculpture from photographic reproductions since, depending on lighting, viewing angle, and quality of the reproduction, the risk of losing key information about

modeling in a third dimension compounds the inevitable distortions that photography introduces even to the study of paintings, prints, or drawings. In the case of the Boston relief, this problem is exacerbated by the fact that the modeling systems are inconsistent from figure to figure within the composition, variations that are minimized in a photograph. In the relief overall, there is no absolute correspondence between depth of carving and notional distance behind or in front of the relief plane (a confusion that may in part account for Pope-Hennessy’s mistrust of the date of the work), and there is even less correspondence between elaboration of detail and narrative, visual, or iconographic importance. The draperies of the angel at the left, for instance, are flat and schematic: simple tubular gouges represent creases or folds, and large areas of fabric are little more than minimally inflected planes. The angel’s left hand, resting on the Christ Child’s shoulder, is incompetently foreshortened and disproportionately large for its position in space, while his right hand, by contrast, is sensitively drawn and carved. Belying this journeyman’s sense of unresolved contrast is the angel’s head (fig. 52), which is animated not only by an accomplished visualization in relief but also by successfully conveying the illusion of moving forward to the left and turning back toward the right. The locks of his hair float in the air around him, communicating the momentum of this movement, and his lips are parted to speak (or sing?). Altogether singular is an almost unimaginably fine and delicate bridge of marble left by the sculptor linking each eyelid to its brow, drilled underneath to create a play of moving shadows that heightens the illusion of light glancing off the angel’s eyes as he lifts them to contemplate the Virgin. Painted devices striving for the same effect are known in the mature works of Perugino (fig. 53), said by Vasari to have been Leonardo’s youthful friend and competitor within Verrocchio’s studio, and in the early works of Perugino’s illustrious pupil, Raphael (1483–1520), but it is difficult to recall any other instances in marble sculpture. The figures of the Virgin and the Child in this relief are carved in a similar depth, but their execution reveals two completely contrasting artistic approaches. The Child was evidently translated from a drawing applied to the face of the marble block, cut straight back in depth well enough to convey the intelligence of its design as a profile but with little more than a sufficiently adequate understanding of anatomy

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

Fig. 50. Andrea del Verrocchio(?) and workshop, Virgin and Child with an Angel, ca. 1480–85. Marble, 97.8 × 74.9 × 16.5 cm (38 1⁄2 × 29 1⁄2 × 6 1⁄2 in.). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of Quincy Adams Shaw through Quincy Adams Shaw, Jr., and Mrs. Marian Shaw Haughton, inv. no. 17.1467a

laurence kanter

Fig. 51. Andrea del Verrocchio with Leonardo da Vinci, The Adoration of the Christ Child, known as the Ruskin Madonna, ca. 1470–72. Tempera and oil(?) on canvas, transferred from panel, 106.7 × 76.3 cm (42 × 30 in.). National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, Purchased with the aid of the Art Fund and the Pilgrim Trust 1975, inv. no. ng 2338

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

Fig. 52. Detail of fig. 50

Fig. 53. Pietro Perugino, detail of the Virgin and Child with an Angel, ca. 1496– 1500. Tempera and oil on panel, overall 114 × 63.5 cm (44 7⁄8 × 25 in.). National Gallery, London, inv. no ng 288.1

laurence kanter

in three dimensions. The Child’s right leg, for instance, is more persuasively realized than His left, which instead is nearly as clumsy as His left hand, while His head introduces a level of detail not encountered elsewhere in His body but is at the same time hard and dry, not nearly as sensitive as the head of the angel. The Virgin (fig. 54), by contrast, is both visualized and executed masterfully in three dimensions. The folds and billows of her mantle project, recede, and double over as would real cloth in real space; the diaphanous fabric of her veil pulls and strains with the volumes of her hair and flutters over her shoulder in tremulously animated surfaces. The serenity of her expression is a profound contrast to the blank, iconic stare of the Child. The buttons at her cuff, the laces on her dress, the cherub and anthemion decoration of her collar, and the lively drilling of the exuberant acanthus and scroll decoration of her chair stand in such stark contrast to the flat expanses of the lower-left portion of the relief as to create the impression almost that the work was left unfinished.46 The remarkable artistic quality of the Virgin in the Boston relief is emphasized if one compares it to a partial replica in marble now in a private collection (fig. 55). This second relief is somewhat weathered and has been cut to the outlines of its original profile then remounted in a new, patterned background; it is unclear whether this relief was meant to be part of an Annunciation group or a differently composed Adoration scene.47 That it is not a fragment from a full-scale copy of the Boston relief is suggested by the completed folds of the Virgin’s mantle where they fall across her right arm. These were hidden in the Boston relief by the figure of the Christ Child so that the artist of the second relief, who may well have been Francesco di Simone Ferrucci, had to invent a solution for them. The simple, flat, and largely vertical incisions for which he opted contrast pointedly with the flowing, looping folds of his model, but not as pointedly as does the schematic carving throughout when considered alongside the achievement of the original.48 Gone is the delicate drilling in the veil or any sense of its complex interaction with the hair it covers; the cherub decoration of the collar no longer has a spatial component to it; the rippling swell of the hem is now a straight, flat line; the hands have lost their articulation; the expression is somnolent rather than contemplative. It is somewhat unfortunate to compare the figures in these terms, and it must be acknowledged that in part the differences between them are a result of their differing

Fig. 54. Detail of fig. 50, during conservation

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

Fig. 55. Attributed to Francesco di Simone Ferrucci, Virgin in Prayer, ca. 1485. Marble, 80 × 60.5 × 12.5 cm (31 1⁄2 × 23 7⁄8 × 5 in.). Private collection

states of preservation. The relief in the private collection is a fine example of late quattrocento Florentine sculpture; its deficiencies are more relative than absolute but demonstrate, more clearly than simple description ever could, the surpassing excellence of the Boston relief. It is difficult to say, in the present state of our knowledge of Florentine sculpture, whose hand wielded the chisel in carving the Virgin in the Boston relief or whether that hand was the same as the designer of the whole composition. The quality, the imagination, the figure types, and the details are sufficiently impressive to satisfy the conventional litmus test for

laurence kanter

an attribution to Verrocchio, but the important point is that one artist alone was not responsible for the entirety of this intriguing sculpture. In this respect, it is typical of the nature of work in Verrocchio’s well-organized studio, where the chief concern seems to have been maintaining a high level of productivity at an effectively controlled standard of quality. Inevitably, this attitude led the artist to experiment with novel approaches to incorporating assistants’ work alongside his own, experiments that he also extended to the manufacture of serial replicas, a class of object regularly if incorrectly dismissed as having been marketed in fifteenth-century Florence as modest commercial products.

It is nearly impossible to make sweeping generalizations about studio practice and the production of serial replicas in Renaissance Florence. Frustratingly little written testimony from the period survives and visual evidence varies markedly from artist to artist. Verrocchio, for example, does not appear to have been interested in the strictly mechanical techniques of replication favored by Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378/81–1455), one of the pioneers of reproductive casting technology in the second quarter of the fifteenth century. Dozens of exact replicas in terracotta and stucco exist of models by Ghiberti or by his son, Vittorio (ca. 1418–1496), some of great complexity of modeling and firing (fig. 56) that may have required a system of piece molds to manufacture. Many of these, admittedly, are probably secondor third-generation casts (made from existing sculptures, not from the original molds) of unknown date, but the great number of surviving casts likely to have been produced directly in the Ghiberti studio suggests that the two artists, father and son,

developed the process into a lucrative industry. Two artists of the following generation, Desiderio da Settignano (ca. 1430–1464) and Antonio Rossellino (1427–1479), devised systems for molding sculptural reliefs so efficiently exact that they could be produced in other artists’ workshops with no loss of fidelity to the original, exceptionally elegant models (fig. 57). Partly this was achieved through reducing the depth of the relief to a point where undercutting was no longer necessary: depth became more an effect of pictorial illusion than of actual physical presence.49 Again, we have no evidence that Verrocchio was interested in exploiting this procedure. Instead, he seems to have been attracted to the more individualistic approach to serial modeling preferred by his great predecessor Donatello, whose extensive intervention after production—subtracting or refining details through recutting the surface, or adding or altering details by applying additional material to the relief after casting—permitted him to rethink the purpose of each work as it was made.

Fig. 56. Workshop of Lorenzo Ghiberti, Virgin and Child, ca. 1430–40. Polychromed and gilt stucco, 80 × 67.5 × 16.5 cm (31 1⁄2 × 26 1⁄2 × 6 1⁄2 in.). Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, inv. no. s30s20

Fig. 57. Desiderio da Settignano, Virgin and Child, ca. 1460. Polychromed and silver gilt stucco, 41.9 × 34.1 cm (16 1⁄2 × 13 1⁄2 in.). Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn., Purchased with a gift from Nina Griggs, inv. no. 2006.231.1

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

Fig. 58. Andrea del Verrocchio, Virgin and Child, ca. 1470–75. Stucco, 84.5 × 60.5 × 10 cm (33 1⁄4 × 23 7⁄8 × 4 in.). Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio, R. T. Miller, Jr., Fund, inv. no. 1944.167

laurence kanter

Verrocchio’s sole foray into the design and production of cast stucco reliefs is a composition that shows the Virgin in half-length behind a parapet supporting the naked and blessing Christ Child, who stands on a cushion placed alongside her on the parapet ledge. The composition is known in two stucco squeezes (fig. 58), a terracotta in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, England (fig. 59), that was either left unpigmented or has lost all traces of its pigmentation, and at least two enameled terracotta replicas made by the Della Robbia family. There is no scholarly consensus on the order or sequence of development of these reliefs, though the few writers to have addressed the question tend to consider the terracotta version in Birmingham the primary model on which the others are based.50 In part, this is due to the prejudice of conventional wisdom, which regards stucco reliefs as inexpensive, mass-market copies of works in other media, chiefly marble, terracotta, or bronze. Stephen G. Rees-Jones was able to demonstrate that the Birmingham relief was modeled, not molded, but he also showed that the two known stuccos—the better preserved of which, illustrated here, is in the collection of the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, Ohio—were not cast from a mold taken from it, as the proportions of the figures are different.51 It does not follow, however, that the modeled version necessarily preceded the molded versions. Wherever the two compositions correspond in detail, especially in the draperies and in the articulation of the facial features and hands, the terracotta blunts and simplifies the crisp projection and sensitive modeling of the stuccos. In some details, the author of the terracotta appears to have misunderstood the corresponding passages in the stuccos. In the stuccos, for example, the veil covering the Virgin’s hair billows outward at the top of her head in the same breeze that lifts its end from her left shoulder. In the terracotta, the gauzy material is instead rendered as a heavy fabric neither wrapped around a braid nor billowing outward but rather falling in stiff folds much lower along the nape of the Virgin’s neck and resting, inexplicably, on her shoulder rather than lifting away from it. Is the stucco composition a “correction” of the terracotta as is frequently supposed, or is the terracotta a freehand copy and simplification of the stucco? Consideration of the figure types and their disposition would argue that the stucco probably represents the artist’s first experiments with this compositional formula. The cushion on which the

Fig. 59. Workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, Virgin and Child, ca. 1480. Terracotta, 74 × 58.4 cm (29 1⁄8 × 23 in.). Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, England, inv. no. 1895p5

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

Fig. 60. Follower of Andrea del Verroccchio, Virgin and Child, ca. 1490–95. Marble, 98 × 85 cm (38 5⁄8 × 33 1⁄2 in.). Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence, inv. no. 116

laurence kanter

Child is standing is beautifully modeled to convey the weight of His body pressing into it, but it is projected from a higher viewpoint than seems to be true for the rest of the relief. In the terracotta, this exaggerated projection is corrected, but the impression of the Child’s weight is lost. The Virgin in the stucco looks down toward her hands as she moves to brace her Son and enfold Him; He looks across to the (viewer’s) right as He begins to turn His body in that direction. This animated and psychologically charged relationship is converted into a static arrangement in the terracotta, where the Virgin—a rounder-faced, heavy-lidded type reminiscent of Verrocchio’s work at the time of the Forteguerri monument in the 1480s— looks at her Son’s head, and He in turn stares directly at the viewer, making His swaying posture more effete than narratively effective. The compositional invention as well as the sculptural presence of the stucco reliefs is of a quality so elevated that it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that Verrocchio worked on them directly. Both surviving examples are deeply undercut around the figures’ chins, beneath both of the Christ Child’s wrists, and especially between the fingers of the Virgin’s left hand and in the draperies at her left wrist and forearm, so much so that they could not have been pulled complete in this form from a mold. Slight variations in these areas between the two surviving casts, furthermore, imply that this undercutting was achieved not by the use of piece molds but by manual reworking of the surface of the relief after casting. The delicate modulation of the surface of the draperies, simulating the effects of real cloth dipped in plaster, and the sensitivity of the modeling of the features in both heads argues that this manual reworking should probably be credited to Verrocchio himself. Some importance attaches to determining the period at which these reliefs might have been designed and cast, as they appear to have been the genesis of a long line of variants and replicas beyond the close “copy” in terracotta in Birmingham and the glazed terracottas from the Della Robbia studio.52 A related marble relief in the Bargello (fig. 60) has been discussed repeatedly as a work emerging from Verrocchio’s studio, though it has more recently been attributed, with greater plausibility, to either Francesco di Simone Ferrucci or Giovanfrancesco Rustici (1474–1554) and postdated to the 1490s.53 A terracotta relief of truly remarkable quality in the Bargello (fig. 61) varies the composition by placing the Christ Child on the Virgin’s left rather than on her right. This relief

Fig. 61. Andrea del Verrocchio, Virgin and Child, ca. 1475. Terracotta, 86 × 66 cm (33 7⁄8 × 26 in.). Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence, inv. no. 415

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

Fig. 62. Andrea del Verrocchio, Virgin and Child, ca. 1470. Tempera on panel, 66 Ă&#x2014; 48.3 cm (26 Ă&#x2014; 19 in.). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Benjamin Altman, 1913, inv. no. 14.40.647

laurence kanter

Fig. 63. Follower of Pietro Perugino, Virgin and Child, ca. 1475. Tempera on panel, 61 × 41 cm (24 × 16 1⁄8 in.). Musée Jacquemart-André, Institut de France, Paris, inv. no. mjap-p 1830

Fig. 64. PierMatteo d’Amelia(?), Virgin and Child, ca. 1470–80. Tempera on panel, 84.7 × 64.6 cm (33 3⁄8 × 25 1⁄2 in.). Städelmuseum, Frankfurt, inv. no. 702

is clearly Verrocchiesque and may be a fully autograph work by the head of the studio—if it is possible to determine what such a thing might be—but just as clearly represents a more developed rethinking of the problems presented by this two-figure group. In addition to further sculptural variants in Berlin,54 Amsterdam, the Museo Bardini in Florence, and elsewhere, a series of painted “meditations” on the composition are also believed to have been produced

in Verrocchio’s studio, including a high-quality example at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (fig. 62),55 as well as others in the Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris (fig. 63),56 the Städelmuseum, Frankfurt (fig. 64),57 and the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin (fig. 65).58 No two of these are thought to have been painted by the same artist, while a recently discovered example that has been attributed to Domenico Ghirlandaio (fig. 66) is believed not even to have been created

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

Fig. 65. Pietro Perugino, Virgin and Child, ca. 1475. Tempera on panel, 75.8 × 47.9 cm (29 7⁄8 × 18 7⁄8 in.). Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, inv. no. 108

laurence kanter

Fig. 66. Attributed to Domenico Ghirlandaio, Virgin and Child, ca. 1475. Tempera on panel, 68 × 52.1 cm (26 3⁄4 × 20 1⁄2 in.). Alana Collection, Newark, Del.

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

in Verrocchio’s studio.59 That all of these ultimately depend on Verrocchio for their inspiration is beyond dispute. Whether any of them represent his own marketing strategies for disseminating his inventions or are to be considered symptoms of his more general influence on the artistic culture of Florence is an open question. Also open to debate is the dating of the paintings to the 1460s, 1470s, or 1480s. Regardless, the exceptionally high quality of all of them is a testament to the fertility of Verrocchio’s imagination and the magnetic attraction it exerted on even the greatest artists of his and the following generations. A similar problem of identification concerns one of the more curious phenomena scholars have observed in late quattrocento Florentine sculpture: the existence of numerous terracotta replicas of the bust of Christ “copied” from Verrocchio’s bronze group of the Doubting of Saint Thomas on Orsanmichele (fig. 67). Over one hundred examples are known to survive, implying that many more, possibly many times more, once existed.60 The fundamental questions of how the market for these objects arose and whether any of them could predate the public unveiling of the bronze group on June 21, 1483, have not been addressed satisfactorily, even though such questions must supersede the more technical issues of who made the busts and how. No two of the busts are exactly alike, and only one (fig. 68) is so close to Verrocchio’s bronze (fig. 69) that it must be considered a product of his direct supervision. This bust shows evidence of having been pressed in a mold to create its general form and then reworked before firing. That it did not originate as a sketch model for the bronze is suggested not only by this production technique but also by the adjustments it makes to a non-narrative context: it is conceived as a portrait bust cut off at the torso, with both arms implied to be held down at the sides. In the bronze group, Christ raises His right arm above Saint Thomas’s head and with His left hand pulls open His robes to reveal the wound in His side. In the bronze, therefore, the draperies over Christ’s left shoulder sweep to the side, and the locks of hair falling at His right shoulder are raised slightly by the motion of that arm. In the terracotta bust, a stately blue robe over the left shoulder stabilizes the base of the composition, the gilded collar and pleats of the red chemise fall straight down over the chest, and the locks of hair at the right shoulder rest casually backward rather than being pulled forward. Otherwise, the expressions, the anatomical

laurence kanter

modeling, and the details of the hair and beard are remarkably similar between the two works, both in detail and in quality, arguing that the one was executed in close proximity to the other and that a single artist was probably responsible for both. One possible explanation for the existence of this terracotta bust is that Verrocchio imagined it as a potential marketing “spin-off” of his work on the bronze. Verrocchio received his commission for the Saint Thomas in January 1467; by April 1468, the concept of a two-figure group had been finalized; and his model for the figure of Christ was ready for casting by August 1470. The actual date of casting is unknown, except that it occurred sometime before March 1476, while chasing may have continued until 1479. Dating the terracotta bust with any precision is impossible, therefore, except to note that it cannot or is unlikely to be earlier than 1470 or later than 1483, when the bronze group finally left Verrocchio’s studio. It could have been conceived and executed between March 1481 and April 1483, when a dispute over payment halted all work on the bronze and Verrocchio may have been toying with a means of salvaging some of his investment of time, but equally it could have been conceived at any earlier moment in the 1470s. If it is thought of as a singular object, as it appears in fact to be, an early date for it is not implausible. Only if considered the prototype for a marketing trend that undoubtedly took wing after 1483 does any imperative for dating it late become unavoidable, but this may be an anachronistic assessment. There is no certainty that Verrocchio had much to do with its mass diffusion in versions of ever more distant fidelity and diminished quality. Some of these may well have been made to order by assistants in his studio, while others must have been free copies by independent artists and many of these could even have been made years after Verrocchio’s death. The mold in which the prime bust was pressed was not reused for any other surviving example. It may have been intended to be used more than once; indeed, it is logical to assume that this was the purpose of working with a mold. Statistical probability alone would argue, however, that it was never intended for more than an extremely limited production, and the amount and sensitivity of surface work on the bust implies that it was considered a luxury object, not a banal commercial replica, from the outset.

Fig. 67. Andrea del Verrocchio, Christ and Saint Thomas, ca. 1470–83. Bronze, Christ: h. 2.3 m (905⁄8 in.), Thomas: h. 2 m (78 3⁄4 in.). Orsanmichele, Florence

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

Fig. 68. Andrea del Verrocchio, Bust of Christ, ca. 1470–83. Polychromed terracotta, 68 × 71 × 40 cm (26 3⁄4 × 28 × 15 3⁄4 in.). Private collection

laurence kanter

Fig. 69. Detail of fig. 67

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

Fig. 70. “Lippi-Pesellino Imitators,” Virgin Adoring the Child Supported by Angels, ca. 1475. Tempera on panel, 108.6 × 58.3 × 8.3 cm (42 3⁄4 × 23 × 3 1⁄4 in.). Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn., Bequest of Maitland F. Griggs, b.a. 1896, inv. no. 1943.226

laurence kanter

Fig. 71. Jacopo del Sellaio, Virgin and Child with Adoring Angels, ca. 1485–90. Tempera on panel, 107.8 × 67.3 cm (42 1⁄2 × 26 1⁄2 in.). Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn., University Purchase from James Jackson Jarves, inv. no. 1871.46

The progressive dilution of Verrocchio’s original model in the great majority of these terracotta busts can also be observed by analogy in paintings and was indeed a common practice among artists catering to what might be described as the mid-level market in Florence in the second half of the fifteenth century.61 A prime example would undoubtedly be the hundreds of paintings today attributed to a fictitious artist known as the PseudoPier Francesco Fiorentino (fig. 70)—actually not an individual but a workshop more accurately described by the label “Lippi-Pesellino Imitators.” 62 Sandro Botticelli (ca. 1444/45–1510) brought the procedure of mechanical replication to assembly-line efficiency, but nearly every workshop in Florence—with the notable exception of that of the Pollaiuolo brothers—relied on some form of serial production as a source of revenue.63 It has long been recognized that Verrocchio’s workshop was particularly fertile ground for the creation and recycling of design ideas, in both painting and sculpture. Most discussion of the practice there has focused on examples plausibly datable to the 1470s and 1480s, but some of the painters involved, like Biagio d’Antonio or Jacopo del Sellaio (ca. 1441–1493), were active as early as the 1460s. Did they discover Verrocchio only later in their careers? Did Verrocchio not paint in the 1460s? If it has not yet been possible to form a stable idea of Verrocchio’s mature style as a painter, how can one approach the search for his immature beginnings? 64 In the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery is a large painting of the Virgin and Child with Adoring Angels (fig. 71), part of the James Jackson Jarves Collection formed primarily in Florence in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.65 A work of prepossessing size but modest artistic merit, it was attributed to Jacopo del Sellaio by Osvald Sirén, followed by Raimond van Marle and Bernard Berenson.66 Only recently has it been recognized to be based quite literally on a little-known painting almost identical to it in size (fig. 72) that has elicited a number of different attributions orbiting vaguely around the Verrocchio and Pollaiuolo workshops.67 Now in the Alana Collection, Newark, Delaware, this painting was first discussed by Federico Zeri as part of a small group of distinguished images divided among the Acton Collection at Villa La Pietra, Florence; the Bernheimer Collection, Munich; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the Musée de Tessé, Le Mans, France (fig. 73).68 All

or some of these have been the subject of varying attributions over the years, most recently to the early career of Sellaio,69 but in truth the Alana painting relates meaningfully only to one of them, the Virgin Adoring the Christ Child in Le Mans. Where the others are linear, flatly modeled, and spatially inconsistent, the Alana and Le Mans paintings are masterpieces of bright, modulated color with highly inventive compositions and successful evocations of deeply recessive, three-dimensional space. The Le Mans painting is clearly an early work by Sellaio; it displays all of that artist’s idiosyncratic habits of technique and form. That the Alana painting is by a different artist may be judged by a simple comparison of it to its “copy” by Sellaio at Yale. Aside from the unbridgeable gulf in quality between them, the two works differ most significantly in one aspect: their setting. In the Yale painting, the Virgin is seated on a bank of clouds against an open blue sky—a flat plane of opaque color. She holds a stalk of lily in her right hand and is adored by two angels appearing behind her at the level of her shoulders. In its prototype in the Alana Collection, the Virgin sits on an elaborately sculpted marble throne revealing a view at the sides to an open arched screen of eccentric construction (what does it support? what purpose does it serve?) through which can be glimpsed a sky, shading from deep blue above to nearly white at the horizon. The Christ Child stands not directly on the Virgin’s thigh but on a velvet cushion, and His mother holds a white dog rose (Rosa canina) that casts a delicate shadow across the back of her right hand. All of the architectural details in the Alana painting are minutely observed, their surfaces brightly colored and evocatively textured. Their perspectival projection is steeply foreshortened to create a sense of telescoping space moving violently forward, toward or through the picture plane, and receding just as rapidly behind the throne to an immeasurable distance, an effect abetted by the claustrophobic filling of the full available area in the tall, narrow picture field—which the original frame reveals to be complete and unaltered—and by the exaggerated proportions of the Virgin’s knees. The composition, format, and spatial structure of the Alana panel recall the seven Virtues painted for the Mercanzia in Florence by Antonio (fig. 74) and Piero del Pollaiuolo and by Sandro Botticelli (fig. 75), a commission for which Verrocchio unsuccessfully competed in December 1469.70 The design of the throne in the Alana painting is more classicizing and less

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

Fig. 72. Andrea del Verrocchio, Virgin and Child, ca. 1465–70. Tempera on panel, 111.3 × 66 cm (43 7⁄8 × 26 in.). Alana Collection, Newark, Del.

laurence kanter

Fig. 73. Jacopo del Sellaio, Virgin Adoring the Christ Child, ca. 1465–70. Tempera on panel, 95 × 48 cm (37 3⁄8 × 18 7⁄8 in.). Musée de Tessé, Le Mans, France, inv. no. r.f. 2088

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

Fig. 74. Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Prudence, 1470. Oil on panel, 167 × 88 cm (65 3⁄4 × 34 5⁄8 in.). Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence, inv. no. 1610

laurence kanter

Fig. 75. Sandro Botticelli, Fortitude, 1470. Tempera and oil on panel, 167 × 87 cm (65 3⁄4 × 34 1⁄4 in.). Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence, inv. no. 1606

fantastic than the thrones in the Mercanzia Virtues, while its projection is far more rational and the space it creates is both more complex and more believable.71 Was the Alana painting made in response to the unveiling of those masterpieces, or could it be a precursor to the compositional challenges they address? The remarkable quality and verisimilitude of detail in this painting, coupled with the resemblance of its figure types and bright, delicate palette to those in the Virgin and Child at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (see fig. 62) and in the Tobias and the Angel in the National Gallery in London (see fig. 41), make it necessary at least to pose two questions: Could this possibly be a work by Verrocchio earlier than those conventionally included in discussions of his career as a painter? What might be the indices of style to bolster or dismiss such an argument? Whoever the author of the Alana Virgin and Child, it was clearly (and deservedly) an admired work of art to have generated so faithful a copy as the Yale painting by Sellaio. But how was the design of the one transmitted to the other? Were original workshop drawings available to Sellaio and his assistants, or did they resort to the simple expedient of copying in front of the original painting? Had the Alana Virgin and Child been displayed in a prominent public location, one might expect more copies of it to exist. Only one other is known, however: a half-length Virgin and Child in which the Christ Child is shown clothed and the composition is closed off at the bottom by a painted parapet (fig. 76).72 Although reversed, this composition is if anything closer to its model than is the Yale painting. Some aspects of the architectural setting are preserved and one significant detail, the disappearance of three of the Virgin’s fingers behind the Christ Child’s arm (rather than one, as in the Yale painting), is copied exactly. No doubt a studio drawing or cartoon was available to facilitate the design of this work, although it cannot now be determined whether its unknown author was working out of Verrocchio’s studio or independently. The Yale painting also shows evidence—visible through infrared reflectography—of the mechanical transfer (tracing) of a full-scale cartoon but only in the Virgin’s right hand; the rest of the composition is drawn freehand and with unexpected freedom, given that it intends to be a copy. Curiously, the fingers of the Virgin’s left hand were originally drawn truncated at the knuckles, as in the Alana painting, but Sellaio then chose to reposition the Child’s left arm and provide fingertips of his own for the Virgin’s

Fig. 76. Follower of Andrea del Verrocchio(?), Virgin and Child, ca. 1480–85. Tempera on panel, 71 × 46 cm (28 × 18 1⁄8 in.). Location unknown

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

hand. Such evidence is inconclusive. It might indicate that the artist was working with a cartoon in his studio and thus had ample opportunity to revise his copy, but if so, the existence of such a cartoon tells us merely that a number of copies or replicas were envisioned; it cannot reveal the identity or the studio affiliations of the draftsman. It is not possible to say whether Sellaio was directly connected with Verrocchio’s studio, whether he knew the Alana painting— assuming it was painted by Verrocchio—firsthand, or if he might instead have had access to some derivative of it. If the latter should prove to be the case, it would remain unclear whether Verrocchio was aware, or approved, of the use to which his invention was being put.

z the pictur e that emerges from these varied examples of Verrocchio’s work as a painter, a sculptor, and the manager of an efficient, proto-industrial studio is no doubt very different from the image with which Kenneth Clark was working more than eighty years ago when he composed the text of Leonardo da Vinci—a text that has provided the touchstone for the present study. Although the lists of paintings to which Clark was making unspoken reference bore no resemblance to the lists compiled here, the language he used to describe them sounds in retrospect prophetic: Looking back on the paintings done by Leonardo in Verrocchio’s studio, we see that they form an intelligible series, recognisably by the same hand as the Virgin of the Rocks. But it is not surprising that an earlier generation of critics was unable to accept them as his. They differ in many ways from his later painting. . . . Of the scientific approach to picture-making, which expressed itself in the use of chiaroscuro and contraposto [sic], they are almost entirely innocent; and they have little of that sense of mystery, that disturbing quality of expression which comes first to mind at the mention of Leonardo’s name. Moreover, we must

laurence kanter

admit that the early pictures are less good than we should expect them to be.73 Clark, of course, was referring to the Ginevra de’ Benci or the Madonna of the Carnation being “less good” than the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne or the Mona Lisa, yet all writers have come to agree with him that they are certainly works by Leonardo. It may now be difficult to sympathize with considering the Louvre Annunciation or the National Gallery Virgin and Child with Two Angels to be “less good” than they ought to be, but clearly, they have been so regarded by many to have been hiding in plain sight for as long as they have been. Just as Renaissance painters came to learn, after some two centuries of experiment according to Vasari, that to represent a baby it is not sufficient to paint a grown man in smaller proportions, so Clark realized that to recognize an artist’s youthful works it is not enough to look for lesser quantities of his mature characteristics. One needs to probe deeper, to find what seem to be the unconscious habits of hand and mind that inform all of his works from every period of his career, independent of the fascinations or obsessions of any given moment. It is also necessary to understand as fully as possible the context, the environment, in which the youthful artist developed and from which his distinct personality must be disentangled. Very few tasks in the history of art are as complicated, one might say quixotic, as understanding the polyvalent world created by Andrea del Verrocchio in his Florentine studio. But surely no small measure of this complexity was due to the residence there of a singular genius—Leonardo da Vinci— whose work will always defy our abilities to circumscribe and categorize it. Hopefully, this catalogue has moved our understanding a few steps forward and will enable future attempts to go further and deeper still.

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

10.

Kenneth Clark, Leonardo da Vinci: An Account of His Development as an Artist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939). Ibid., 25. Ibid. Ibid. The letter, not in Leonardo’s own hand but nevertheless believed to be authentic, is preserved in the Codex Atlanticus and reads in part: “I can carry out sculpture in marble, bronze, or clay, and also in painting whatever may be done, and as well as any other, be he whom he may” (“condurrò in scultura di marmore, di bronzo e di terra: simile in pictura ciò che si possa fare a paragone di ogni altro e sia chi vuole”). See Jean Paul Richter, The Literary Works of Leonardo, 3rd ed. (London: Phaidon, 1970), 2:398. Attempts to attribute sculptures to Leonardo have not been few or unimaginative but have almost without exception been contentious and controversial. A recent proposal by Gary Radke to identify portions of documented commissions to Verrocchio as probable contributions by Leonardo is, on the other hand, largely persuasive; see Gary Radke, “Leonardo, Student of Sculpture,” in Leonardo da Vinci and the Art of Sculpture, ed. Gary Radke, exh. cat. (Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 2009), 15–62. “Grandissimi doni si veggono piovere dagl’influssi celesti ne’corpi umani, molte volte naturalmente, e soprannaturali talvolta; strabocchevolmente accozzarsi in un corpo solo, bellezza, grazia e virtù in una maniera, che dovunque si volge quel tale, ciascuna sua azione è tanto divina, che lasciandosi dietro tutti gli altri uomini, manifestamente si fa conoscere per cosa, com’ella è, largita da Dio e non acquistata per arte umana. Questo lo videro gli uomini in Lionardo da Vinci.” Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, ed. Gaetano Milanesi (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1906), 4:17; English translation by Herbert Horne, reprinted in Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere (New York: Knopf, 1996), 1:625. “E benchè fosse giovanetto, lo condusse di tal maniera, che molto meglio delle figure d’Andrea stava l’angelo di Lionardo; il che fu cagione ch’Andrea mai più non volle toccar colori, sdegnatosi che un fanciullo ne sapesse più di lui.” Vasari-Milanesi, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, 4:22; and Vasari, Lives of the Painters, 1:628. Vasari-Milanesi, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, 4:22–23n2. No documents concerning the commission for this altarpiece have been recovered and it is therefore dated by inference only, scholars generally placing it in the early to mid-1470s (but see n10, below). In 1485 Verrocchio acknowledged having received a commission to paint an altarpiece for the cathedral of Pistoia (see n12, below), clearly after the putative date of the San Salvi Baptism. Adolph Bayersdorfer, “Zwei Gemälde von Andrea del Verrocchio in der Akademie zu Florenz, I: Die Taufe Christi,” in Adolph Bayersdorfers Leben und Schriften, ed. H. Mackowsky et al., 2nd ed. (Munich: Bruckmann, 1908), 72–76. See also David Alan Brown, Leonardo da Vinci: Origins of a Genius (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 27, 169. The Uffizi Annunciation is frequently regarded as Leonardo’s first identifiable independent work by those authors who accept its attribution to the artist; it had historically (and well into the second half of the twentieth century) been regarded as by Domenico Ghirlandaio. See Antonio Natali, “Dubbi, difficoltà e disguidi nell’ Annunciazione di Leonardo,” in L’Annunciazione di Leonardo: La montagna sul mare, ed. Antonio Natali (Milan: Silvana, 2000), 37–60. The portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci in Washington has a longer history of acceptance, though some of it reluctant, and is generally assumed to have been painted in the mid-1470s. See David Alan Brown, in Miklós Boskovits et al., Italian Paintings of the Fifteenth Century, The Collections of the National Gallery of Art, Systematic Catalogue (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2003), 357–69. Umberto Baldini, Un Leonardo inedito (Florence: Università Internazionale dell’Arte, 1992); Antonio Natali, “Lo sguardo degli angeli: Tragitto indiziario per il Battesimo di Cristo di Verrocchio e Leonardo,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 42, nos. 2–3 (1998): 253–72; and Antonio Natali, “Lo sguardo degli angeli,” in Lo sguardo degli angeli: Verrocchio, Leonardo e il “Battesimo di Cristo,” ed. Antonio Natali (Milan: Silvana, 1998), 64. This analysis posits a delay between two phases of work on the altarpiece, which scholars arbitrarily assume to have been short or long depending on their interpretive biases but generally concur as having begun around 1468 to 1470.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

See, for example, Federico Zeri, “Il Maestro dell’Annunciazione Gardner,” Bollettino d’arte 38, no. 2 (1953): 135–37; Günter Passavant, Andrea del Verrocchio als Maler (Düsseldorf, Germany: L. Schwann, 1959); Konrad Oberhuber, “Le problème des premières oeuvres de Verrocchio,” Revue de l’art 42 (1978): 63–76; and Everett Fahy, “Two Suggestions for Verrocchio,” in Studi di storia dell’arte in onore di Mina Gregori, ed. Miklós Boskovits (Milan: Silvana, 1994), 51–55. Archivio di Stato di Pistoia, Comune, Consigli, Provvisioni e Riforme, vol. 48 (1483–92), fols. 111v–112r, November 21–25, 1485, and vol. 6 (1482–87), fol. 147v, November 25, 1485. See Alfredo Chiti, “Andrea del Verrocchio in Pistoia,” Bullettino storico pistoiese 1 (1899): 47–49; Passavant, Andrea del Verrocchio als Maler, 229, doc. 33; and Dario A. Covi, Andrea del Verrocchio: Life and Work (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2005), app. 2, 350–51, nos. 51a–b. Vasari-Milanesi, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, 4:566; and Vasari, Lives of the Painters, 1:801. On Lorenzo di Credi’s birth date, see Gigetta Dalli Regoli, Lorenzo di Credi (Milan: Comunità, 1966), 8n3. In the catasto filing of 1469, Lorenzo’s widowed mother reports his age as twelve (therefore born in 1457), whereas in the catasto of 1480, she claims he is twenty-one (therefore born in 1459). Dalli Regoli prefers a birth date of ca. 1457, but many modern authors use 1459. R. Langton Douglas, Leonardo da Vinci: His “San Donato of Arezzo and the Tax Collector” (London: Chiswick Press, 1933), 17–31; and Martin Davies et al., European Paintings in the Collection of the Worcester Art Museum (Worcester, Mass.: Worcester Art Museum, 1974), 382–86, 628. William R. Valentiner, “Leonardo as Verrocchio’s Coworker,” Art Bulletin 12, no. 1 (1930): 51, 59–60. Bruno Mottin and Rita Piccione Albertson carefully analyze the physical and stylistic connections between the Worcester and Louvre paintings in their essays published in this catalogue. “Perchè a Lorenzo piaceva fuor di modo la maniera di Lionardo, la seppe così bene imitare, che niuno fu che nella pulitezza e nel finir l’opere con diligenza l’imitasse più di lui.” Vasari-Milanesi, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, 4:564; and Vasari, Lives of the Painters, 1:800. Vasari further claims that among Lorenzo di Credi’s earliest paintings was one “ritratto da uno di Lionardo da Vinci . . . ma tanto simile a quello di Lionardo, che non si conosceva l’uno dall’altro” (“which was likewise copied by Lorenzo from one by Leonardo da Vinci . . . and so similar was it to that by Leonardo, that no difference could be seen between the one and the other”). Vasari-Milansi, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, 4:566; and Vasari, Lives of the Painters, 1:801. See the excellent summary by Carmen C. Bambach, “Documented Chronology of Leonardo’s Life and Work,” in Leonardo da Vinci: Master Draftsman, ed. Carmen C. Bambach, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003), 228. The middle ground of the landscape of the Adoration of the Christ Child in Edinburgh (see fig. 51), frequently attributed to Verrocchio, is projected from a comparably low viewpoint and with equally successful results. See n44, below, for a discussion of the possibility that this painting may be attributable in large part to Leonardo, in collaboration with Verrocchio. See, for example, Royal Collection, Windsor, England, inv. no. 12380. Paul Müller-Walde, Leonardo da Vinci: Lebensskizze und Forschungen über sein Verhältniss zur florentiner Kunst und zu Rafael (Munich: G. Hirth, 1889), 31; Edmund Hildebrandt, Leonardo da Vinci: Der Kunstler und sein Werk (Berlin: G. Grote, 1927), 30; and Raimond van Marle, The Development of the Italian Schools of Painting, vol. 11, The Renaissance Painters of Florence in the 15th Century, the Second Generation (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1929), 498. Larry Feinberg, The Young Leonardo: Art and Life in Fifteenth-Century Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 8. Leonardo, in a note written in Rome around 1515, describes the engineering feat of Verrocchio’s having installed the copper orb atop the lantern of the cathedral of Florence, an event he undoubtedly witnessed firsthand in May 1471. Luca Beltrami, Documenti e memorie riguardanti la vita e le opere di Leonardo da Vinci (Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1919), 3. See Natali, Lo sguardo degli angeli. Brown, Leonardo da Vinci, 75–99, 101–21; and Bambach, “Documented Chronology.” It should be noted that dating Leonardo’s early Florentine paintings is entirely inferential and dependent therefore on assumptions that cannot be verified by external documentation. Only the unfinished Adoration

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

27. 28. 29.

30.

31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

100

of the Magi altarpiece for San Donato a Scopeto, now in the Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence, inv. no. 1594, can be precisely dated by documents, work on it having begun in 1481 and broken off at Leonardo’s departure for Milan one or two years later. Carlo Gamba, “Due tavole del Museo Jacquemart-André,” L’arte 21 (1957): 3–4; and Michel Laclotte and Nicolas Sainte Fare Garnot, Primitifs italiens (Paris: Noêsis, 2000), 24–29, 136–38. N. Blondel, “Projet pour un catalogue raisonné des peintures italiennes des XIV et XV siècles du Musée Jacquemart-André” (Diss., École du Louvre, 1975), 148. Laclotte and Garnot, Primitifs italiens, 29; and Luciano Bellosi, in Due collezionisti alla scoperta dell’Italia: Dipinti e sculture dal Museo Jacquemart-André di Parigi, ed. Andrea Di Lorenzo (Milan: Silvana, 2002), 68–71. The Battle of Pydna was exhibited in Budapest; see Dóra Sallay, Vilmos Tátrai, and Axel Vécsey, eds., Botticelli to Titian: Two Centuries of Italian Masterpieces, exh. cat. (Budapest: Szépművészeti Múzeum, 2009), 132, no. 7, where it was published by Nicolas Sainte Fare Garnot as by “Andrea del Verrocchio and workshop (with Leonardo da Vinci’s contribution),” accepting the opinion expressed earlier by Carlo Gamba, in “Due tavole del Museo Jacquemart-André.” These five marriages are deduced from cross-referencing the Monte dei Doti, the Notarile Antecosimiano, and the Carte Dei. I am grateful to Darcy and Treacy Beyer, Brenda Preyer, and Gabriella Battista for their generous and invaluable assistance in this research. Following his death in 1488, Verrocchio’s brother Tommaso redacted a list of eleven works that Andrea had created for the Medici; see Günter Passavant, Verrocchio: Sculptures, Paintings, and Drawings, Complete Edition (London: Phaidon, 1969). Leonardo’s connection to the del Giocondo family can only be documented from his second Florentine period, after 1503, when the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, popularly known as Mona Lisa, sat for him for her portrait. Report of the c2rmf, no. f13517-4413, kindly provided by Bruno Mottin. The investigator, Christine Benoit, studied three samples, taken from different parts of the painting, with gas chromatography and mass spectrometry. She concluded that the binding medium included proteins derived from the yolk of eggs but left open the possibility of an admixture of drying oils. Passavant, Andrea del Verrocchio als Maler; and Brown, Leonardo da Vinci, 24–26. See Roberta Bartoli, Biagio d’Antonio (Milan: Motta, 1999), 31–36, for a summary of opinions regarding this altarpiece. Konrad Oberhuber, in “Le problème des premières oeuvres de Verrocchio,” argued for an attribution to Verrocchio. See Miklós Móré, “Compte rendu de la restauration du retable de la Vierge en trone à l’Enfant avec cinq saints et deux anges par Andrea del Verrocchio,” Bulletin du Musée Hongrois des Beaux-Arts 80–81 (1994): 59–75, esp. fig. 33. See Jill Dunkerton and Luke Syson, “In Search of Verrocchio the Painter: The Cleaning and Examination of The Virgin and Child with Two Angels,” National Gallery Technical Bulletin 31 (2010): 4–41. Ibid., 27. Brown, Leonardo da Vinci, 42–43. Nicholas Penny, “Le peintre et l’atelier dans l’Italie de la Renaissance,” in Ateliers de la Renaissance, ed. Roberto Cassanelli (Paris: Zodiaque, 1998), 47; and Pietro C. Marani, Leonardo: Un carriera di pittore (Milan: Motta, 1999), 23–25. Brown, Leonardo da Vinci, 51–52. Ibid. See, for example, Passavant, Andrea del Verrocchio als Maler, 95–102, 235–36. Andrew Butterfield, The Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 228–29. Jean Gaborit, “Deux anges,” in Léonard de Vinci: Les études de draperie, ed. Françoise Viatte, exh. cat. (Paris: Herscher, 1989), 104, saw a single artist at work in deliberately varying styles. Passavant, Verrocchio: Sculptures, Paintings, and Drawings, 28–31, first commented on the differences between the two angels and attributed the right angel to Leonardo. Inexplicably, Butterfield, who dismissed Passavant’s suggestion, considers the right angel the weaker of the two. This much-discussed work has been attributed to Domenico Ghirlandaio by Federico Zeri (in a letter of 1980, curatorial files, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh) and Everett Fahy (in a lecture delivered at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). At an earlier moment (1975), Fahy wrote to the restorer of the painting, John Brealey, that he and John Pope-Hennessy agreed with

laurence kanter

45.

46.

47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

52.

53.

Kenneth Clark in attributing it to Leonardo. Accurate judgments of this painting are compromised by its condition. It has been transferred from panel to canvas and heavily restored along extensive losses following seams between the three planks of its original support—one through the Virgin’s elbow, the other through the Child’s knees—and along the bottom, right, and top edges. The top and bottom edges, in particular, have been entirely, and freely, reimagined. The present author believes the painting to be another example of the collaboration between Leonardo and Verrocchio, with Verrocchio responsible for little more than the Christ Child and Leonardo having contributed the figure of the Virgin and the entire landscape and architectural setting, but the judgment is tempered with caution due to the condition of the painting. It is possible that an experimental oil medium was employed in passages of this painting, but its transfer to canvas makes this difficult to confirm visually. See Linda Pisani, Francesco di Simone Ferrucci: Itinerari di uno scultore fiorentino fra Toscana, Romagna e Montefeltro (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2007). The Boston relief was attributed to Ferrucci by Passavant, Verrocchio: Sculptures, Paintings, and Drawings, 214. Roberta Bartoli, “La palestra del Verrocchio,” in Natali, Lo sguardo degli angeli, 26, related it to pictorial sources in Verrocchiesque works, such as the San Domenico a Maglia altarpiece (see fig. 9). These variations were noted by Pisani, Francesco di Simone Ferrucci, 41n201, who cautiously omitted the Boston relief from her catalogue of works by Ferrucci. She considers it a three-dimensional rendition of the Virgin and Child with Two Angels in the National Gallery, London (see fig. 33), and therefore, by implication, either a product of Verrocchio’s workshop or modern. A stucco copy of the Boston relief noted by Pisani (American Art Association, New York, Gothic and Renaissance Italian Works of Art, the Collection of Professor Comm. Elia Volpi, sale cat., March 31–April 2, 1927, lot 405) does appear to be modern. Charles Avery, in Icons or Portraits? Images of Jesus and Mary from the Collection of Michael Hall, ed. Ena Giurescu Heller, exh. cat. (New York: American Bible Society, 2002), 264–65. If the relief was made as a copy of the Boston Madonna, it is possible that the flat carving of the draperies at the lower left is modern “restoration” to eliminate vestigial remains of the Christ Child broken off at that edge. The repeated references to models by Desiderio da Settignano in the account books of the painter Neri di Bicci (Bruno Santi, ed., Neri di Bicci: Le ricordanze [Pisa: Edizioni Marlin, 1976], 59, 60, 156–57, 186, 239) imply that Neri owned Desiderio’s molds and had numerous squeezes made—up to two dozen at a time—at intervals in order to keep a supply in his studio. For one of these— known in two versions, one with the Virgin’s halo foreshortened and one with the halo molded flat against the background (see fig. 57)—Neri produced two panel paintings apparently as templates for his assistants to follow in pigmenting the reliefs. These are preserved in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon, France, and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn., inv. no. 1943.220. See Stephen G. Rees-Jones, “A Fifteenth Century Florentine Terracotta Relief, Technology, Conservation, Interpretation,” Studies in Conservation 23, no. 3 (1978): 95–113. For the Oberlin stucco, see Laurine Mack Bongiorno, “A Fifteenth-Century Stucco and the Style of Verrocchio,” Allen Memorial Art Museum Bulletin 19 (1962): 115–41. The second stucco, sometimes known as the Diblee or Signa relief, appeared at sale at Christie’s, London, June 2, 1964. Its present whereabouts are unknown but it is reproduced in Rees-Jones, “Fifteenth Century Florentine Terracotta Relief,” 110; and Passavant, Verrocchio: Sculptures, Paintings, and Drawings, app. 19. One of the glazed terracottas, in the sacristy at Santa Croce in Florence (Passavant, Verrocchio: Sculptures, Paintings, and Drawings, app. 18), appears to have been cast from a mold taken from one of the stucco squeezes discussed herein. A close replica in the Galleria Communale di Palazzo Pretorio in Prato, Italy, adds two cherub heads and stalks of lilies to the background, a dove of the Holy Spirit at the top, and a bird in the Christ Child’s right hand but is otherwise identical in composition to the Santa Croce relief. The relief, known as the Fontebuoni Madonna, was attributed to Ferrucci by Francesco Caglioti, in Eredità del Magnifico, ed. Paola Barrochi, exh. cat. (Florence: Studio per edizioni scelte, 1992), 54–56. This attribution was not accepted by Pisani, Francesco di Simone Ferrucci, 41, and was shifted instead to

Giovanfrancesco Rustici by Tommaso Mozzati. See Tommaso Mozzati, “‘Fece . . . una nostra donna col figlio in collo’: Tradizione e maniera moderna nelle Vergini con Bambino di Giovanfrancesco Rustici, II parte,” Nuovi studi (2004): 95–104; and Tommaso Mozzati, Piermatteo d’Amelia e il Rinascimento nell’Umbria meridionale, ed. Vittoria Garibaldi and Francesco Federico Mancini (Milan: Silvana, 2009), 126. 54. Piero Adorno, Il Verrocchio: Nuove proposte nella civiltà artistica del tempo di Lorenzo il Magnifico (Florence: Edam, 1991), 246, fig. 148. This relief, in pigmented terracotta, is generally discussed as a replica of the marble Fontebuoni Madonna in the Bargello. Tommaso Mozzati, who believes the latter is by Rustici (see n53, above), considers the Berlin terracotta to have emerged from Verrocchio’s workshop and to be the closest surviving reflection of the lost model on which the composition is based. 55. Federico Zeri and Elizabeth E. Gardner, Italian Paintings: A Catalogue of the Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Florentine School (New York: New York Graphic Society, 1971), 151–53. 56. See Nicolas Sainte Fare Garnot, in Le Pérugin: Maître de Raphaël, ed. Vittoria Garibaldi, exh. cat. (Brussels: Fonds Mercator, 2014), 94–95. 57. Rudolf Hiller von Gaertringen, Italienische Gemälde im Städel, 1300–1550: Toskana und Umbrien (Mainz, Germany: Philipp von Zabern, 2004), 291–306. Federico Zeri, “Il Maestro dell’Annunciazione Gardner,” attributed this painting to the Master of the Gardner Annunciation, now identified as PierMatteo d’Amelia, and nearly all subsequent discussion of it has been focused on supporting or rejecting this attribution. 58. Passavant, Verrocchio: Sculptures, Paintings, and Drawings, 207. Both this and the Jacquemart-André painting (see n56, above) were attributed by Zeri (in “Il Maestro dell’Annunciazione Gardner”) to Pietro Perugino. This seems persuasive for the Berlin painting, but the painting in Paris is by a different hand. 59. Andrea Staderini, in The Alana Collection, vol. 3, Italian Paintings from the 14th to 16th Century, ed. Sonia Chiodo and Serena Padovani (Florence: Mandragora, 2014), 79–84. 60. Butterfield, Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio, 212. 61. See, for example, Lisa Venturini, “Modelli fortunate e produzione di serie,” in Mina Gregori et al., Maestri e botteghe: Pittura a Firenze alla fine del quattrocento, exh. cat. (Milan: Silvana, 1992), 147–61. 62. Zeri and Gardner, Italian Paintings, 106–9. 63. Serial production in Botticelli’s workshop has always stymied accurate assessment of his autograph works. Most catalogues treat the numerous replicas of any given composition as copies by assistants after a prime version by the master and seek to identify which of them might be prime. More often than not, a considerable number of the replicas exhibit (sometimes extensive) traces of Botticelli’s direct intervention in painting over a mechanically transferred cartoon, sometimes to alter slightly the meaning of the work, sometimes merely to refine or expedite completion. No fully satisfactory description of this process yet exists in print, but see, most recently, Roberta J. M. Olsen, “Botticelli’s Madonna of the Magnificat: New Discoveries about Its Iconography, Patron, and Serial Repetition,” in Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510): Artist and Entrepreneur in Renaissance Florence, ed. Gert Jan van der Sman and Irene Mariani (Florence: Centro di, 2015), 120–55. 64. An intriguing proposal for an early painting by Verrocchio was advanced by Luke Syson and Jill Dunkerton, “Andrea del Verrocchio’s First Surviving Panel Painting and Other Early Works,” Burlington Magazine 153 (2011): 368–78. The principal subject of their study, a Virgin and Child with Two Angels in the National Gallery, London, inv. no. ng 2508, seems on the basis of its unusual brownwash priming layer and dark chiaroscuro tonality to be a slightly later work dependent on Verrocchio’s (and Botticelli’s) example, not precedent to it. 65. Charles Seymour, Jr., Early Italian Paintings in the Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Art Gallery, 1970), 183–84, no. 136. 66. Osvald Sirén, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Pictures in the Jarves Collection Belonging to Yale University (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1916), 129–30; Raimond van Marle, The Development of the Italian Schools of Painting, vol. 12, The Renaissance Painters of Florence in the 15th Century, the Third Generation (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1931), 409; Bernard Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: A List of the Principal Artists and Their Works (Oxford: Clarendon, 1932), 527; and Bernard Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: Florentine School (London: Phaidon, 1963), 1:123.

67. 68. 69.

70.

71.

72.

73.

The painting was subsequently reassigned by Everett Fahy to the Master of the Fiesole Epiphany, a sometime collaborator of Jacopo del Sellaio, and restored to Sellaio by Christopher Daly, in “A New Fragment of the Carmine Altarpiece and Other Works by Jacopo del Sellaio,” Commentari d’arte 20, nos. 58–59 (May– December 2014): 53–60. Severely abraded, the painting of the principal figures may be ascribed to Sellaio while the attendant cherubim are interventions by his studio. The underdrawing is very strong and certainly autograph. Daly, “New Fragment of the Carmine Altarpiece,” 54. Zeri and Gardner, Italian Paintings, 116–17; and Gigetta Dalli Regoli, Il Maestro di San Miniato (Pisa: Giardini, 1988), figs. 57–62, 64. Corentin Dury, Peintures italiennes et hispaniques: Collections du Musée de Tessé, XIVe– XVIIIe siècles, exh. cat. (Ghent, Belgium: Snoeck, 2016), 76–78. Everett Fahy, who first proposed an attribution for the group to the artist he named the Argonaut Master and subsequently recognized as the early career of Sellaio, removed the Le Mans painting from the set; Everett Fahy, “The Argonaut Master,” Gazette des beaux-arts 114 (1989): 292, 296. See Alison Wright, The Pollaiuolo Brothers: The Arts of Florence and Rome (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005), 226–50. Piero del Pollaiuolo was commissioned in August 1469 to paint the figure of Charity. In December, Verrocchio submitted a drawing in an unsuccessful attempt to win the remainder of the commission. Botticelli was awarded a contract for the figure of Fortitude in May 1470. His painting is the closest of the series to the Alana Virgin and Child, whether because it reflects to some degree the lost drawing by Verrocchio or because of a similar temperament between the two artists cannot be determined. Of the remaining Virtues, only Temperance, Faith, and Justice are unequivocally by Piero del Pollaiuolo, notwithstanding the widely held assumption that he was responsible for the entire series. Prudence and (probably) Hope were painted by Antonio del Pollaiuolo. See Alessandro Cecchi, “Le Virtù di Pollaiuolo e Botticelli dopo il restauro” (lecture, presented at Florence and the 1470s: Contexts and Contrasts, National Gallery, London, November 12–13, 1999); Laurence Kanter, review of The Pollaiuolo Brothers: The Arts of Florence and Rome, by Alison Wright, Burlington Magazine 148 (April 2006): 279–81; and Alessandro Cecchi, “Piero o Antonio? Considerazioni sulle Virtù del Tribunale della Mercanzia e le altre opere degli Uffizi alla luce dei restauri,” in Antonio Natali and Angelo Tartuferi, La stanza dei Pollaiolo: I restauri, una mostra, un nuovo ordinamento (Florence: Centro di, 2007), 41–54. The bottom four inches of paint surface in the Alana Virgin and Child are modern restoration. The implausible articulation of the dais of the throne, the clumsy painting of the Virgin’s feet, and the incongruous truncation of the folds of her robe splayed on the ground are not original. See Sotheby’s, New York, sale cat., June 18, 1974, lot 108; and Finarte, Milan, sale cat., November 19, 1997, lot 134. The panel was attributed to Biagio d’Antonio by Federico Zeri, an attribution correctly rejected by Roberta Bartoli, in Biagio d’Antonio, 240. The painting is too damaged and repainted to sustain a firm ascription to any artist. Clark, Leonardo da Vinci, 26–27.

leonardo da vinci, pupil of andrea del verrocchio

101