Feinberg L.J. The Young Leonardo: Art and Life in Fifteenth-Century Florence
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4. First Years in Florence and the Verrocchio Workshop 27
Verrocchio himself, adding the finishing touches to his marble bust of
the Florentine patrician Francesco Sassetti (c. 1464–65). The master,
undoubtedly, would have taken him across town to see the holy-water
basin (lavamano) that he, when an assistant, had years earlier created
with the sculptor Antonio Rossellino for the Old Sacristy of San
Lorenzo.
Unusually versatile, Verrocchio was one of the few sculptors of
his time to work in both bronze and marble and one of the rare
sculptors who also painted. The contemporary Florentine writer and
civic booster Ugolino Verino praised Verrocchio as comparable to the
ancient sculptor Phidias, noting that he even “surpasses the Greek in
one respect, for he both casts and paints.” In fifteenth-century Flo-
rence, only Verrocchio, Lorenzo Ghiberti, and Antonio Pollaiuolo
combined those skills. Verrocchio was reportedly a competent musi-
cian as well.
Although born (between 1434 and 1437) to an artisan family that
was not especially wealthy, Verrocchio was very literate and cultured,
with a small library of classical and humanist texts, including the
first-century Heroides of Ovid and the fourteenth-century Triumphs of
Petrarch. He devoted himself to the study of antique art. He probably
knew more about ancient Greek and Roman sculpture than anyone
of his generation. Although such pieces informed his works, he rarely
chose – or was given the opportunity – to tackle classical subject
matter in his art. Nonetheless, his knowledge and talents profoundly
impressed the Medici, who gave him as many commissions as he could
handle; his earliest surviving sculptures, the lavamano and La Piagnona,
were created for Medici churches, and Sassetti, of whom he carved an
arresting bust, was the Medici’s banker.
After Verrocchio completed those works, the family assigned him
a range of projects in various media – a bronze sculpture of David
(c. 1465), the marble and porphyry tombs for Cosimo, Piero, and
Giovanni de’ Medici (c. 1465–67 and c. 1469–73), a polychromed
terracotta relief of the Resurrection (c. 1470) and a bronze Putto with
Dolphin (c. 1470–early 1480s) for the Medici villa at Careggi, and
an altarpiece, depicting the Virgin and Child with saints, for the
cathedral in Pistoia (c. 1475). Always accommodating, Verrocchio and
his assistants also produced painted-canvas standards for Medici jousts
(1469 and 1475) and elaborate festival decorations for the state visit of
28 The Young Leonardo
the Duke of Milan in 1471. Through him, Leonardo gained a useful
understanding of the Medici’s tastes and interests.
Apparently, however, Verrocchio never mastered the fresco tech-
nique and so was not able to teach it to Leonardo and other shop
assistants. This partly explains why Leonardo chose unconventional
means when he was later assigned to create large murals, such as his
Last Supper for the Milanese church of S. Maria delle Grazie and Battle
of Anghiari for the Florentine Palazzo della Signoria. In both cases,
he employed highly experimental media and consequently watched
his works begin to decay almost as soon as he laid them on the wall.
As we shall see, Leonardo probably lacked the desire and patience to
learn the laborious fresco technique from skilled practitioners in other
ateliers.
He seems also to have inherited certain unfortunate work habits
from Verrocchio’s shop, specifically the tendency, shared by modern
building contractors, to move on to a new project before completing
the one at hand. Two major paintings produced by the shop (on which
Leonardo collaborated), the Pistoia Madonna della Piazza (fig. 21)and
the Baptism of Christ (fig. 22), were both completed years after they
were begun, with long periods during which the works were left to
gather dust. Later, the famous sixteenth-century biographer of artists,
Giorgio Vasari, lamented Verrocchio’s inability to finish pictures, a
failing that he would retain until the end of his life, as evidenced by
the incomplete quadro grande (large picture) and other works listed in
his estate.
Normally, a young man apprenticed to an artist spent his days
grinding colors, preparing gesso, and fulfilling numerous other duties
until the master deemed him worthy to participate in the actual exe-
cution of works. Given the varied activities of Verrocchio’s enterprise
and Leonardo’s great capacity to learn, his novitiate would have
involved an increasingly – and unusually – wide range of experiences,
perhaps as much in the applied and technical arts of casting bronze
and hoisting blocks of stone as in the fine art of draftsmanship. Highly
stimulated by the bustle and exchange of professional secrets, Leonardo
nevertheless would have spent many tedious hours employed in the
lowly tasks of the creato (literally, “creature,” as such assistants were
called) before his master, Verrocchio, assured of his abilities with pen
and brush, allowed him to assist on paintings.
4. First Years in Florence and the Verrocchio Workshop 29
Leonardo would have received a bare subsistence wage, probably
supplemented with funds from Ser Piero, who initially paid for his
son’s internship with the master. The young man’s starting annual
salary might have been as low as 6 or 8 florins and would have risen,
by the time he was seventeen (the earliest age at which assistants
became independent masters), to perhaps 18 or 20 florins. We know
that a shop assistant to the contemporary Florentine painter Neri di
Bicci received the annual sum of 15 florins, along with “a pair of
hose.” The pay of the creato was even less than it seems on face, for
an illiterate, low-level servant would have been paid perhaps 8 florins
per year, an unskilled laborer could have expected to receive 30 to 40
florins, a druggist 50, a civil servant 70, and a senior municipal official
as much as 300 florins annually. Moreover, a workshop member was,
like a servant, at the master’s constant beck and call, obliged to be
available for work at all hours of the day and night and even on
holidays if necessary. To cast the situation in a somewhat happier light,
one might say that Leonardo had joined a professional “family,” in
which his life was entwined with the master’s and in which notions
of individual privacy (then as now in Italy) hardly existed.
After Leonardo had demonstrated his considerable painterly tal-
ents, he still would have been rather restricted in how he could apply
them. Understandably, products from Verrocchio’s shop were required
to follow the master’s design and style closely, despite the many con-
tributing hands. For this reason, the principal figures in paintings, even
those touched by Leonardo, adhered to strict prototypes, often gen-
erated from cartoons (full-sized preparatory drawings) that the master
produced. Assistants normally could assert their individuality in a shop
piece only in less prominent details, such as a distant landscape or other
minor, natural elements.
Tales of Leonardo’s juvenile inclinations and adventures suggest
that he was always drawn to the natural world and was, no doubt,
happy to be anointed as the one primarily responsible for the natural
elements in Verrocchio workshop pictures. In light of its specificity
of detail, there may well be some truth to the aforementioned story,
related by Giorgio Vasari, that the inventive, young Leonardo painted
on a buckler, or shield, a “monster of poisonous breath, belching – fire
from its eyes and smoke from its nostrils,” a pastiche of various parts of
lizards, insects, and other, repulsive creatures he had collected. Later,
30 The Young Leonardo
according to Vasari, Leonardo prepared for the Medici a tapestry car-
toon representing Adam and Eve in a verdant landscape with animals
and much vegetation, including accomplished depictions of a palm,
a fig tree, and “a meadow with an infinite variety of herbs.” That
composition is lost, along with a painting of the Head of Medusa,
undoubtedly a tour de force demonstration of Leonardo’s snake-
rendering skills, once kept in the Medici storage vault, the guardaroba.
Leonardo’s ingenuity and zoological knowledge would not have
escaped the attention of Verrocchio, who, as a former goldsmith,
had himself created a “cup full of [that is, decorated with] animals”
and other “bizarre fancies.”
Some reports of Leonardo’s concern for animals sometimes sound
almost like passages from a hagiography of Francis of Assisi, such as
the claim that the artist sometimes bought songbirds from their sellers
only to release them to freedom. Yet, seemingly corroborating this
story, Leonardo once wrote that “the goldfinch will carry spurge [a
deadly poison] to its little ones imprisoned in a cage – death rather
than loss of liberty.” It is known that, later in life, Leonardo kept
many horses. (This was an unusual luxury in that most artists could
only afford to rent horses or to own mules.) He apparently also loved
dogs. Every now and then, he would pause from his work to sketch a
canine companion in the margin of the page before him. On a sheet
of Leonardo’s optical illustrations in the manuscript known as the
“Codice Atlantico” (in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan), there is
one such study of a dog, evidently content simply to sit quietly beside
its inattentive master, the animal well accustomed to his interminable
periods of drawing and writing (fig. 4). The hound may have been
the lone, welcome guest in his studio; he advised artists to work in
solitude, allowing the presence of colleagues only if absolutely neces-
sary. Throughout his life, Leonardo conducted research in comparative
anatomy and drew a wide range of animals, both real and imaginary;
the only, unfortunate, omission from his pictorial bestiary, because of
his absence from Florence, was the beloved, doomed giraffe, given to
Lorenzo de’ Medici as a gift by the sultan of Egypt in 1487,which
died after striking its head on a beam in the Medici palace.
In fact, the artist’s fascination with nature intersected with that of
Lorenzo, one of several interests that the two young men shared,
which may have formed the basis for a respectful and cordial
4. First Years in Florence and the Verrocchio Workshop 31
Figure 4.
Leonardo da Vinci,
Optical Studies and
Resting Dog,c.1492–
95?, pen and ink, Milan,
Biblioteca Ambrosiana,
Codice Atlantico (599r).
Finsiel/Alinari/Art
Resource, NY.
relationship. Lorenzo, who assembled a famed menagerie, enthusi-
astically bred fine horses (for which Leonardo designed stables), cattle,
pigs, hounds, and rabbits. His poetry, mainly pastoral, teemed with
animal and landscape imagery: cranes and falcons, deer and oxen, ilex
trees and olive groves, and rushing streams. Just three years Leonardo’s
senior, the high-spirited Lorenzo also would have appreciated the
artist’s musical abilities and irreverent sense of humor, about which I
will later comment at length. Il Magnifico composed and sang hunt-
ing and love songs and was notorious for telling funny, often ribald,
32 The Young Leonardo
stories. His carpe diem attitude is revealed in the jaunty, carnival song
he wrote in 1470:
How lovely is youth –
Yet it slips away;
If you can be happy, be so.
For there is no certainty about tomorrow.
Some allowances should be made for the clich
´
es, refrained in subse-
quent verses; the lyricist was barely out of his teens.
5. First Works in Florence
and the Artistic Milieu
T
he earliest surviving traces of Leonardo’s hand – and
affection for animals – would seem to be found in the Tobias
and the Angel (c. 1472–73), now in the National Gallery, London
(fig. 5), a collaborative picture from the Verrocchio shop. The partic-
ipation of two hands in the work’s execution has long been apparent,
in light of the stylistic contrast between the sculptural rigidity of the
anatomy and costumes of the figures and the more freely rendered
dog and fish. The wavelike patterns of the dog’s unruly fur compare
closely to the many sketches of the movement of water and hair that
soon after streamed from Leonardo’s pen. The dead-eyed helplessness
and glistening scales of the carp (or tinca), gasping for breath, sug-
gest the touch of someone who studied aquatic life closely. Famously
able to survive for long periods out of water, the common river fish
would have provided a live (and fresh-smelling) model for hours before
becoming a meal.
An appreciative Verrocchio may have permitted Leonardo’s brush
to delineate as well the lively, luminescent curls of Tobias’s hair and
the intricate, knotted and fluttering belts and hems of the figures’
garments. Leonardo no doubt distinguished himself in the studio in
such subtle application of highlights and in the other remarkable effects
of illumination he could attain in the mixed media of tempera and oil
paint, then relatively new to Florence. Consequently, he became the
person called on to add those last, gilt-edged details, the final polish,
before the works left the shop.
The novel medium of oil paint, which Botticelli and others were
also beginning to employ, would have much intrigued Leonardo. With
it he knew that he could achieve qualities of translucency and trans-
parency that far surpassed the capabilities of tempera and fresco as well
33
34 The Young Leonardo
as tenors of expression that the literal-minded Flemish, originators of
the technique, had just barely explored. He had found a vehicle not
only for success but also for investigation; his experimentation with
media would continue for more than thirty years, with either sublime
or disastrous results.
A respectful homage to a painting of the same theme by the broth-
ers Antonio and Piero Pollaiuolo, the Verrocchio-workshop Tobias
and the Angel was meant, nevertheless, to eclipse it. From the time
of the major competition for the Baptistery doors project at the
dawn of the fifteenth century, artistic rivalries were enthusiastically
encouraged and pursued in Florence. Confident in the skills of his
gifted student, Verrocchio must have felt he could compete well with
the Pollaiuolo brothers and would have welcomed the opportunity
to make a reduced variant of their painting, then on display in the
church of Orsanmichele. The commission probably came to Verroc-
chio from someone with cataracts or other eye troubles (or who had
a family member with poor vision), because the subject of the pic-
ture, from the apocryphal Book of Tobit, recalls how the young Tobit,
guided by an angel, cured his father’s blindness with the entrails of a
fish. This charming, popular story of filial piety was appended to the
Old Testament in many, early vernacular Bibles. As we shall see, the
vision-related theme would have much appealed to Leonardo, and
the implicit, painterly competition would have begun to prepare him
for a far more public and overt guerra (or war), as such artistic contests
were called, some three decades later, when he would compete with
Michelangelo in the grand salon of the city hall.
For a young artist in the Verrocchio crew, who may have felt that
he was devoting an inordinate amount of time to making studies for
pictorial gowns and dresses (a particular strength and specialty of the
shop), the works of the Pollaiuolo brothers, masters of the nude figure
in action, must have seemed exciting. Celebrated for their deliberately
ungraceful, painted and bronze figures of Hercules and other sinewy
nudes in violent engagement, the Pollaiuolo boys offered a macho,
avant-garde alternative to the conservative, luxury-goods industry of
Verrocchio. They had a well-earned reputation for artistic boldness.
Not since antiquity had classical subjects, the Labors of Hercules, been
treated on such a colossal scale – one much grander than most religious
pictures of the period. The Pollaiuoli’s large trio of canvasses in the
Medici Palace, with their stunning male nudes, must have had a public
5. First Works in Florence and the Artistic Milieu 35
Figure 5.
Workshop of Andrea del
Verrocchio (including
Leonardo da Vinci),
Tobias and the Angel,
c. 1472–73, oil on panel,
London, National
Gallery.
C
National
Gallery, London/Art
Resource, NY.
impact akin to that of the 1819 Paris unveiling of Theodore Gericault’s
painting the Raft of the Medusa, in which a sensational, contemporary
event was rendered on a monumental scale previously reserved for
high-minded, history paintings.
Leonardo furtively cast an eye on the Pollaiuoli’s heroic productions
throughout his first period in Florence and, on occasion, discreetly
borrowed from “the competition” for some of his major compositions.
The workshop of the brothers Pollaiuolo (so nicknamed because their
father was a poultry seller) was centrally located on via Vacchereccia,
opposite the Palazzo della Signoria, and therefore a convenient stop
for Leonardo, whose father lived nearby, and for other curious artists
from Verrocchio’s shop. Probably in direct response to the famous
36 The Young Leonardo
Figure 6.
Leonardo da Vinci,
View of the Arno
Valley, 1473,penand
ink, Florence, Uffizi,
Gabinetto Disegni e
Stampe. Scala/Ministero
per i Beni e le Attivit
`
a
culturali/Art Resource,
NY.
engraving of a Battle of Nudes (c. 1471–73) by his rivals, Verrocchio
created his own ostentatious, “display” drawing of the subject, long
lost. However, he never managed, in most minds, to pose a serious
challenge to Pollaiuolo preeminence in the mastery of the unclothed
male figure.
Possibly in the same year that he assisted with the Tobias, Leonardo
rendered his earliest known, dated drawing – not surprisingly, a land-
scape – presumably made on the spot (fig. 6). The vibrant sketch
captures, with familiarity, a view of the Arno River valley with the
town of Montalbano, northwest of Florence near Vinci, in the left
distance. The sheet is inscribed in his usual left-handed, backward
manner, “[feast] of Holy Mary of the Snow, day of August the 5th,
1473,” in reference to the anniversary of a miraculous snowfall, and
to a shrine in the area that commemorated it. His pen enlivens as it
records, evoking not only a spectacular, somewhat exaggerated topog-
raphy of breathtaking chasms and infinite plains but also the natural
forces of wind, heat, and geological erosion. It is clear that Leonardo,
still in his early twenties, had already spent considerable time contem-
plating the processes of geological formation and the cycling of water.