Verrocchio's influence on Leonardo Da Vinci

From his sculpture, therefore, we see that Verrocchio's influence on Leonardo was considerable--so considerable, indeed, that various scholars have sought to prove that the Leonardesque characteristics can only be due to the pupil assisting his master in sculpture as we know he did in painting. This is a hypothesis I cannot accept. Tradition, which is clear enough in the matter of his paintings, never suggests that Leonardo had a hand in his master's sculpture. Moreover, Verrocchio's sculpture seems to form a series almost as coherent as his painting; if Leonardo's influence is present in one piece it is present in all, and this is impossible because several pieces, the model of the St Thomas group and the David, almost certainly date from before 1470. Finally Verrocchio's sculpture, even though it may recall Leonardo in certain details, is fundamentally different in conception. Take the silver relief of the Duomo, with its Leonardesque warrior head. It is essentially the work of a sculptor craftsman. The relief is bold and clear, the detail sharp, the transitions abrupt. We recognise the same plastic sense which we encountered in Verrocchio's paintings. In Leonardo's sculpture the silhouettes would have been more evasive, the transitions smoother, the detail more impressionistic.

Bode, it seems to me, had a truer feeling for Leonardo's essential qualities when he attributed to him the reliefs now generally (but not conclusively) ascribed to Francesco di Giorgio, the Pietà in the Carmine, Venice, the Flagellation in the Gallery of Perugia and the Discord in the Victoria and Albert Museum. No doubt he was mistaken, but it was the rich and imaginative mistake of a great critic, for the reliefs have just these qualities of impressionistic modelling and flickering life, which should distinguish Leonardo's sculpture from that of his master. Their unknown author, the most original and inspired of all Donatello's pupils, does not seem to have worked in Florence, and so can hardly have influenced Leonardo, who, as far as we know, never visited Urbino or Siena in his youth.

Apart from the possibility of his having assisted Verrocchio, has any of the sculpture done by Leonardo in these first Florentine years come down to us? There can be no doubt that he did do sculpture, for Vasari expressly states that certain terracotta heads of children and smiling women were made by him in his youth, and this is confirmed by entries in a list of works, made soon after he left Florence, which refer to sculpture in relief. We know too, that he recommended himself as a sculptor to Ludovico Sforza. Unfortunately, no certain example of Leonardo's early sculpture survives, and most of the pieces attributed to him, the bust of the Young St John in the Victoria and Albert Museum, for example, have little to recommend them. Only one, indeed, seems to be worth considering, both for its own sake, and because it throws some light on the character of Leonardo's art at this date. This is the small terracotta statuette of the Virgin and the laughing Child in the Victoria and Albert Museum, which has long occupied the attention of Leonardo scholars. Unlike the other sculpture attributed to Leonardo, this is a charming and distinguished work showing obvious affinities, both of style and spirit, to Leonardo's early drawings. Perhaps it is even too charming. None of his early paintings is so neat and exquisite; and where else in Leonardo do we meet with these sharp-pointed features and these elegant hands, with nearly-tapering fingers, very different from the spidery fingers in Leonardo's Uffizi Annunciation? In fact, the whole group seems, at first, to be too far from the style of Verrocchio to be by his pupil. But here we must remember another element in the development of Leonardo's style, the influence of Desiderio da Settignano. In his early drawings, Leonardo is closer to Desiderio than to any other predecessor or contemporary. They create the same world--the natural world transfigured by freshness and grace--without the materialism of Verrocchio, the melancholy of Botticelli or the faintness of Fra Filippo. They have the same feeling for flow of line, the same feeling for surface rather than mass. When we examine Leonardo's early paintings, we find more reason to refer to Desiderio than to Verrocchio; and so the affinities to Desiderio in this terracotta group speak in its favour, and only a certain finished prettiness prevents me from accepting it unreservedly as the work of Leonardo.