VERROCCHIO, ANDREA di MICHELE di FRANCESCO de' CIONI, Called Il. - Painter, sculptor and goldsmith, b. in Florence in 1436 and d. in Venice on 7 Oct. 1488. He was called V. because as a youth he worked in the shop of the goldsmith Giuliano Verrocchi.
A pupil of Alessio Baldovinetti, he came under the influence of Pesellino and later also that of his collaborators, Ghirlandaio and Perugino (Berenson). As a sculptor, according to tradition, he derives from Donatello, but no bond exists between the two artists, except an outward one. The fact that V. probably finished the Lavabo, left unfinished by Donatello in the sacristy of S. Lorenzo, and took his place with the Medici, has a purely historical value.
He is undoubtedly closer to Ghiberti and to Desiderio da Settignano. On the other hand his formation and the attribution of his own works remain to this day an open problem, despite the numerous studies that criticism has devoted to him. The definition of a leading personality such as this is made more complex by the proximity of Leonardo, who in 1470, at the age of 17, entered V.'s shop, precisely in the period in which the latter, who was above all a sculptor, devoted himself to painting; until those times, in fact, he is found cited in documents as "schalpellatore", goldsmith, carver. The oldest tradition speaks of a collaboration by the young Leonardo on the famous painting of the Baptism of Jesus for the church of S. Salvi, now at the Uffizi, and even today criticism is not in agreement on the limits of this collaboration. Among the other painting works, one may recall a Madonna with Child of the Kaiser Friederich Museum in Berlin, later than the Baptism, and the altarpiece of the cathedral of Pistoia, a school work painted for the most part by Lorenzo di Credi. The first work of sculpture dates to 1467, the year in which V. began the group with Christ and St. Thomas, in the tabernacle of the Mercanzia (executed by Donatello in Orsanmichele); this work was finished in '83. Of 1472 is the tomb of Piero de' Medici in the sacristy of S. Lorenzo, of refined coloristic elegance, greatly admired also in his own times (Vasari). Of the same year is probably also the bronze David (now in the Museo nazionale), ceded to the Signoria in 1476 by Lorenzo and Giuliano de' Medici, to be placed in the Palazzo Vecchio, where now instead there is, adorning the fountain of the courtyard, the Winged Putto with the Fish, executed shortly after 1469 for the villa of Careggi. In 1477 V. works on the sepulchre of Francesca Pitti Tornabuoni, of which there remain two bas-reliefs that adorned the front of the sarcophagus (Florence, Museo nazionale) and four Virtues (Paris, J. André collection); works singular for their sincere and passionate adherence to reality, expressed outside the classical canons, with a new violence. The Decollation of the Baptist for the dossal of the Baptistery of Florence is of 1480. In the Museo nazionale of Florence are preserved: the Madonna of S. Maria Novella (terracotta), another Madonna in marble; the bust of the Lady known as of the violets, which many attribute to Leonardo, especially for the sensitive, very beautiful hands. After 1477 V. began to work on the monument of Card. Fortu-guerri at Pistoia, then interrupted because V. had received from the Republic of Venice the commission for the monument to Colleoni. In '81 V. went to Venice carrying with him the model in "rags" of the horse, which he destroyed in scorn when he learned that the Serenissima had decreed that Bellano should execute the figure of the condottiere. But in 1481 he resumed work in Venice, leaving all his interests in Florence entrusted to his disciple Lorenzo di Credi. When he died the Republic entrusted to Alessandro Leopardi the task of casting the work. The latter, an expert bronze-caster with strong tendencies toward decoration, wished to caparison the steed as for a tournament, it seeming to him that this conferred greater solemnity on it. By V. there exist drawings at the Uffizi, at the Louvre, at the British Museum, at Oxford and in the Cabinet of drawings of the Kaiser Friederich Museum of Berlin. Works of uncertain attribution and of school are in the aforementioned Museum of Berlin (Madonna), at Frankfurt and at the National Gallery of London (Madonna recognized by Berenson as a sure painting by him). Of his goldsmith's works there remains only the silver relief of the altarpiece of St. John the Baptist in the Opera del duomo of Florence (1472). - See pl. CXXXV.
