Leonardo Da Vinci: Verrocchio's workshop

We know that by 1469 Leonardo had come, with his father, to five in Florence, and in 1472 he was inscribed on the roll of the guild of St Luke as a painter--Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci dipintore. He was then twenty years old and if he followed the usual course of apprenticeship he must have been learning the art of painting for at least four years. Tradition and the evidence of style tell us that his first master was Verrocchio; and we learn from documents that he was still in Verrocchio's workshop in 1476; so that it is important for us to know something about an artist with whom Leonardo spent ten years.

Verrocchio has always been regarded as the typical craftsman of the Florentine renaissance, ready to undertake any work which demanded skill in the handling of materials, from the setting of a precious stone to the casting of the sphere of gilded copper which still surmounts the Duomo. But no single formula can cover Verrocchio in both his painting and his sculpture. Verrocchio's pictures, as they have come down to us, form a small coherent group.

They are largely and firmly drawn, and in each one the figures dominate the landscape with a certain grandeur. But they do not stir the imagination. Their forms are metallic, their colours unsubtle and bright. The world they create for us is the prosaic world of a practical man; whereas in Verrocchio's sculpture there is a suggestion of the incalculable forces and fantasies which we associate with Leonardo. For this reason the relation between Leonardo and Verrocchio the sculptor is close yet problematic, and to understand the formative influences on Leonardo, we must begin by looking at the principal pieces of sculpture executed by Verrocchio while Leonardo was in his workshop. Of datable works we have first the group of the Incredulity of St Thomas at Or San Michele. It was commissioned in 1463 and we know that Verrocchio was at work on the model between 1467 and 1470.

The Lavabo in the Sacristy of San Lorenzo must date from before 1469, the sarcophagus tomb of Piero and Giovanni de' Medici is dated 1472. Of undated pieces we can be sure that the bronze David in the Bargello and the terracotta relief of the Resurrection from Careggi belong to the years of Leonardo's apprenticeship. To a later period, but one in which Leonardo was still in Verrocchio's shop, belong the silver relief of 1477 in the Opera del Duomo, and most probably the lost bronze reliefs, which Lorenzo de' Medici sent to Mathias Corvinus. Now a characteristic which these works have most markedly in common is a love of twisting movement, either in the whole composition or in details. The St Thomas group is the first instance in the Renaissance of that complicated flow of movement through a composition, achieved by contrasted axes of the figures, which Leonardo made the chief motive of all his constructions, and which, through him, became the foundation of the mannerist style. Even the bronze David has an alert twist of the body, and in the Careggi relief the movements and attitudes of the figures are extraordinarily like Leonardo's early drawings. As for twisting movement in the details, Vasari describes how Verrocchio loved to draw knots and elaborately-plaited hair and we have ample confirmation of this in the bronze flowers which writhe and flow with the exuberance of nature round the porphyry sarcophagus of the Medici; or in the drawings of actual hair in the British Museum, plaited in almost exactly the same style that Leonardo was to use, more than thirty years later, in his cartoon of Leda. We must suppose that Leonardo's love of curves was instinctive, born of his earliest unconscious memories, but that his master showed him the forms in which his innate sense of rhythm could most easily find expression.

Secondly, Verrocchio's sculpture shows the same facial types which we find in Leonardo's early drawings. Seen in profile, the David is very like one of Leonardo's elegant young men with wavy hair. He even has the hardly perceptible smile which was to become a part of the Leonardesque ideal, and we may find this smile on other works of Verrocchio, the St Thomas or the heads which decorate the basin in S. Lorenzo. It was Verrocchio, too, who first used this type of pretty boy in contrast with ferocious nutcracker old men. The motive survives in the silver relief of the Beheading of St John the Baptist, where the old warrior is strikingly Leonardesque; but no doubt its classical expression was to be found in the famous pair of bronze reliefs of Scipio Africanus and Darius, whose original forms can be deduced from numerous replicas in every possible medium--marble, stucco, glazed terracotta. I think it possible that Leonardo himself made free versions of these reliefs. A marble in the Louvre and a stucco in the Victoria and Albert Museum have enough Leonardesque character of modelling and design dimly to reflect his Scipio; and his Darius is known from the silver point in the British Museum, one of the most finished and elaborate of his early drawings. A more enduring influence of these reliefs--the whole notion of contrasting youthful and aged, effeminate and virile heads--I shall treat more fully when I come to speak of Leonardo's caricatures.