The paintings done by Leonardo in Verrocchio's studio

The Pistoja altar-piece was the product of Verrocchio's workshop, at the period when Leonardo was in charge of the department of painting. It was begun about 1475, and a document tells us that in 1478 it was 'said to be finished or nearly so'. It therefore cannot have been designed by Credi, who was only sixteen at the time it was begun, and never in his life succeeded in creating such a dignified composition. But he certainly finished it in 1485, and seems to have treated it with the thoroughness of a nineteenth-century restorer dealing with an old master, for every inch of it shows his smug, lifeless handling. As a result of this change of surface it is difficult to say if the original design--the part 'said to be finished or nearly so' in 1478--was in any way due to Leonardo. Personally, I do not think he could have produced anything so static and conventional, and believe that the composition must have been done by Verrocchio himself, and that Leonardo may have superintended the first laying in of the design when he was in Pistoja in 1478. Granted that he was employed on the altar-piece we can easily suppose that he chose to work on what, to him, may have been the most attractive part, the little Annunciation of the predella. For although the Louvre Annunciation resembles Credi in some of the details--hands, flowers and even draperies--it has a unity of tone and movement which is far beyond anything in his work. In particular, it has Leonardo's subdued colour, whereas Credi from the first seems to have delighted in hard, commonplace reds, blues and greens, which his admirable technique has preserved for us intact.

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, and are particularly unlike the exaggerated pupil's work on which the conception of Leonardo's style was formerly based. Of the scientific approach to picture-making, which expressed itself in the use of chiaroscuro and contraposto, 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 admit that the early pictures are less good than we should expect them to be. Only one of them, the Liechtenstein portrait, is wholly successful as a work of art. The others must be enjoyed in detail or 'read backwards' in the light of his later work. But it would be unfair to judge the young Leonardo on his surviving paintings alone. Throughout life he was an untiring draughtsman and a larger number of his drawings have survived than of any other Renaissance painter. It is these which allow us to follow the continuous process of his growth as an artist, and it is in the drawings of this early period that we see his promise in relation to his maturity.

Nothing in his later work surpasses in spontaneity his pen and ink sketches of the Mother and Child, nor in a kind of austere delicacy the silverpoint study for the head of the Madonna Litta. At twenty-five Leonardo had the rapid perception, the skill and rhythm of hand of a Watteau or a Degas. But how little this tells us about the painter of the Last Supper! In these early drawings he floats so swiftly on the stream of his talent that he is hardly aware of its depths--those unfathomable depths into which he was afterwards to peer so intently. It was not by improving or refining upon these gifts that he evolved the massive and mysterious structure of his art, but by employing them with an intellectual power of which his early work gives us hardly any indication. But before this process had begun to fade the quattrocento freshness of his vision, he was to attempt one great composition in which his genius for rhythmic notation was for the first time controlled by his speculative intelligence: the Adoration of the Magi from San Donato a Scopeto.