Leonardo lavoro un angelo che teneva alcune vesti

Those of Verrocchio's paintings which are known to us must have been executed before 1472. After that date he seemed to abandon painting altogether. It is perhaps no coincidence that our earliest evidence of Leonardo as a painter dates from this year, and it is in the next six years that we must place the paintings which most critics are now agreed to call his earliest works: The Annunciation in the Uffizi, the Virgin with the Flowers in the Munich Gallery, the portrait in the Liechtenstein Collection, and the Benois Madonna in the Hermitage. These pictures all have qualities in common which connect them with the first indisputable painting of Leonardo, the Virgin of the Rocks, and which are in contrast to the paintings of Verrocchio. Instead of Verrocchio's clear local colours, they are conceived in low tones of olive green and olive grey; instead of his bold, firm modelling, the heads and hands are drawn with a curious delicacy and an eye for minute gradations of surface. None of Leonardo's contemporaries imagined this twifit world, so different from the bright enamelled daylight of the quattrocento. These pictures, then, owe little to Verrocchio. Yet we can be sure that they were executed in his shop, not only because Leonardo was working with him at the time, but because they contain certain of his studio properties. In fact, we can deduce from the documents for the Pistoja altar-piece that they were commissioned and sold as works of Verrocchio, or rather of ' Verrocchio and Co.' Leonardo in his master's workshop held a position not unlike that of a head cutter in a small but distinguished firm of tailors, and it was natural that the proprietor, though himself a capable homme du métier, should leave to his gifted assistant that part of the work in which he himself had least interest. Here again we can find a core of truth in Vasari's story of how Leonardo painted the angel in Verrocchio's Baptism, "which", he says, "was the reason why Andrea would never again touch colours, being most indignant that a boy should know more of the art than he did".

Possibly Verrocchio, when he saw such striking evidence of his pupil's skill, did give up painting, not so much from motives of jealousy or shame, as from expediency. It was enough to have one good painter in the firm: in future he could confine himself to his favourite arts of sculpture and goldsmithy.

We must now examine Leonardo's early painting in detail. Following Vasari we may begin with Verrocchio's Baptism. He says that Leonardo lavoro un angelo che teneva alcune vesti, and there follows the story of Verrocchio's jealous disgust, to which I have just referred. In a recent period of scepticism so picturesque an anecdote was naturally discredited; but it is supported both by document and style. The Baptism is one of the few pictures mentioned in a meagre guide to Florence, Albertini Memoriale, which, since it was written in 1510 when Leonardo was still in Italy, must be looked on as a reliable source. Above all, we have, in the angel's head, unmistakable evidence of Leonardo's early style, all the more clearly seen in contrast to the angel of Verrocchio. With the prophetic power sometimes found in the earliest work of genius, Leonardo had foreshadowed a change which was to come over Italian art in his lifetime. Verrocchio's angel is of the same family as all the angels of the quattrocento, since the time of Luca della Robbia's singing boys.

He has the same broad, bony face, the same short nose, the same wavy hair. The treatment is perfectly naturalistic. He seems to look with astonishment at his companion, as at a visitant from another world; and in fact, Leonardo's angel belongs to a world of the imagination which Verrocchio's never penetrated. In every line of the nose, cheek and chin this head reveals an ideal of perfection. To some extent this idea, like all our dreams of physical perfection, was inspired by the antique, fragments of which Leonardo must have seen in Florence at the time. But the cascade of hair, rippling over the angel's shoulder, is his own invention, where, as in a miraculous bud, is one side of Leonardo's art, the "beauty touched with strangeness" of Pater. Yet this head, which foreshadows so much of his mature vision, is obviously the work of a young painter, more intent on the delicate outlining of detail than on mass and structure. It must, I suppose, date from between about 1470 and 1472. The angel's draperies are also by Leonardo and show a curious system of folds, rather stiff and angular but most delicately rendered. Here, too, we have confirmation in Vasari, who says that when Leonardo was a student "he often made figures in clay which he covered with a soft worn linen dipped in clay, and then set himself to draw them with great patience on a particular kind of free Rheims cloth or prepared linen; and he executed some of them in black and white with the point of a brush to a marvel, as some of those which we have in our book of drawings still bear witness". A number of these drawings still exist, 1 and from their hard, stiff folds we can see that Vasari's account of their origin is perfectly correct. The angel's draperies were certainly painted from such drawings--two of them may even have been amongst the studies used--and the peculiar character of Leonardo's early draperies can be understood.