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Michelangelo executed the mask of a satyr which attracted the notice of Lorenzo the Magnificent; finally, Mantegna painted his first masterpiece-the Madonna of the church of S. Sophia at Padua -when he was seventeen.

Autres temps, autres mœurs ! Nowadays, at thirty, an artist is considered young and brilliant, with all his future before him. Four hundred years ago many a great artist had said his last word at that

age.

Apprenticeship properly so-called-by which the pupil entered the family of the master-was for two, four, or six years according to the age of the apprentice; this was succeeded by associateship, the duration of which also varied according to age, and during which the master gave remuneration to a greater or less amount (Lorenzo di Credi, Leonardo's fellow-student, received twelve florins, about £24 a year). Mastership was the final point of this long and strenuous initiation.1

Before studying the relations between Leonardo da Vinci and Verrocchio we will endeavour to define the character and talents of the latter. 2

Andrea Verrocchio (born in 1435) was only seventeen years older than his pupil, an advantage which would seem relatively slight over such a precocious genius as Leonardo; we may add that the worthy Florentine sculptor had developed very slowly, and had long been absorbed by goldsmith's work and other tasks of a secondary character. Notwithstanding his growing taste for sculpture on a grand scale, he

1 These patriarchal customs remained in force till well into the eighteenth century. Thus Sébastien Bourdon spent seven years under his first master though, it is true, he was only fourteen when he left him. In 1664, the statutes of the Paris Academy of Painting and Sculpture fixed three years as the average term of apprenticeship; each member of the Academy might only receive one pupil at a time.

2 In my Histoire de l'Art pendant la Renaissance (vol. ii. p. 497) and in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts (1891, vol. ii. p. 277–287) I have endeavoured to describe the evolution of Verrocchio's talent and to draw up a catalogue of his works. I here add a few notes to my former essays. If the tomb of Giovanna Tornabuoni, formerly in the church of the Minerva at Rome, is now generally recognised as a production from the studio of the master, but not by his own hand, a learned critic, Herr Bode, attributes to Verrocchio various bas-reliefs in bronze and stucco: the Descent from the Cross with the portrait of Duke Federigo of Urbino (?) in the church of the Carmine at Venice; the Discord in the South Kensington Museum, the Judgment of Paris, a bronze plaque in the collection of M. Gustave Dreyfus of Paris (Archivio storico dell' Arte, 1893, PP. 77–84) These compositions are essentially loose and supple in treatment.

undertook to the last those decorative works which were the delight of his contemporaries, the Majani, the Civitali, the Ferrucci. We learn from a document of 1488 that up till the very eve of his death he was engaged upon a marble fountain for King Mathias Corvinus.1 Herein he shows himself a true quattrocentist.

The following are a few dates by which to fix the chronology of the master's work.

In 1468-1469 we find him engaged on a bronze candelabrum for the Palazzo Vecchio. In 1472, he executed the bronze sarcophagus of Giovanni and Piero de' Medici in the sacristy of the church of San Lorenzo. In 1474, he began the mausoleum of Cardinal Forteguerra in the cathedral at Pistoja. The bronze statue of David (in the Museo Nazionale, Florence) brought him into evidence at last in 1476. Then came (in 1477) the small bas-relief of the Beheading of John the Baptist, destined for the silver altar of the Baptistery; between 1476 and 1483 the Unbelief of S. Thomas; finally, towards the end of a career that was all too short (Verrocchio died in 1488, at the age of fifty-three), the equestrian statue of Colleone, his unfinished masterpiece.

The impetus necessary to set this somewhat slow and confused intelligence soaring was-so the biographer Vasari affirms-a sight of the masterpieces of antiquity in Rome. For my part, I am inclined to attribute Verrocchio's evolution to the influence of Leonardo, so rapidly transformed from the pupil into the master of his master ; an influence which caused those germs of beauty, scattered at first but sparsely through Verrocchio's work, attained to maturity in the superb group of The Unbelief of S. Thomas and the Angels of the Forteguerra monument, rising finally to the virile dignity, the grand style, of the Colleone.

Compared with the part played by Michelangelo, that of Verrocchio, the last great Florentine sculptor of the fifteenth century, may appear wanting in brilliance; it was assuredly not wanting in utility. Verrocchio was before all things a seeker, if not a finder; essentially incomplete in organisation, but most suggestive in spirit, he sowed more than he reaped, and produced more pupils than masterpieces. The revolution he brought about with Leonardo's co-operation 1 Gaye, Carteggio, vol. i. pp. 569–570. Cf. p. 575.

was big with consequences; it aimed at nothing less than the substitution of the picturesque, sinuous, undulating, living element, for the plastic and decorative formulæ, sometimes a little over-facile, of his predecessors. Nothing, as a rule, could be less precise than his contours; the general outline is difficult to seize; above all things, he lacks the art of harmonising a statue or a bas-relief with the surrounding architecture, as is abundantly proved by his Child

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with a Dolphin with its strained, improbable, and yet delicious, attitude. He is the master of puckered faces, of crumpled, tortured draperies; no one could be less inspired by the antique, as regards clearness of conception, or distinction and amplitude of form. But there is an extraordinary sincerity in his work; he makes a quiver of life run through frail limbs, reproduces the soft moisture of the skin, obtains startling effects of chiaroscuro with his complex draperies, gives warmth and colour to subjects apparently the most simple. This reaction against the cold austerity of the two Tuscan masters

most in favour at the time, Mino di Fiesole and Matteo Civitale di Lucca, was much needed, though Verrocchio has perhaps rather overshot the mark.

His favourite type of beauty is somewhat unhealthy, and not wholly devoid of affectation. Ghirlandajo's Florentine women are haughty and impassive; Botticelli's fascinating in their guileless tenderness; Verrocchio's are pensive and melancholy. Even his men-take the S. Thomas, for instance

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-have a plaintive disillusioned smile, the Leonardesque smile.

All there is of feminine, one might almost say effeminate, in Leonardo's art, the delicacy, the morbidezza, the suavity, appear, though often merely in embryo, in the work of Andrea Verrocchio.

To sum up, Verrocchio is the plastic artist, deeply enamoured of form, delighting in hollowing it out, in fining it down; he has none of the literary temperament of a

HEAD OF A SAINT, BY PERUGINO. (Church of Santa Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi, Florence.)

Donatello, a Mantegna, masters who, in order to give expression to the passions that stir them, to realise their ideal, need a vast theatre, numerous actors, dramatic subjects. There is no mise-en-scène, no searching after recondite ideas with Verrocchio, any more than with Leonardo. The simplest subject-a child playing with a dolphin, a woman holding a flower-suffices them for the condensation of all their poetry, all their science.

A critic has spoken of the natural sympathy between Verrocchio and Leonardo. "In neither artist," says Rio, the eloquent and intolerant author of L'Art Chrétien, "does harmony exclude force; they

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show the same admiration for the masterpieces of Greek and Roman antiquity, the same predominance of the plastic qualities, the same passion for finish of details in great as well as small compositions, the same respect for perspective and geometry in their connection with painting, the same pronounced taste for music, the same tendency to leave a work unfinished, and begin a fresh one, and, more remarkable still, the same predilection for the war-horse, the monumental horse, and all the studies appertaining thereto." But are not these points of contact rather due to chance than any intellectual relationship between the two temperaments? and may not more than one of the arguments brought forward by Rio be equally well turned against him? Verrocchio was a limited spirit, a prosaic character; Leonardo, on the other hand, was the personification of unquenchable curiosity, of aristocratic tastes, of innate grace and elegance. The one raises himself laboriously towards a higher ideal; the other brings that ideal with him into the world.

We shall see presently what was Leonardo's attitude with respect to his master's teaching. For the moment we will confine ourselves to affirming that never did artist revolt more openly against all methodical and continuous work.

Under this master-so essentially suggestive-Leonardo was thrown with several fellow-students who, without attaining his glory, achieved a brilliant place among painters. The chief of these was Perugino. Born in 1446, and consequently six years older than Leonardo, the young Umbrian artist had passed through the most severe trials before becoming known, perhaps even before winning the attention of so reputed a master as Verrocchio. For long months together, Vasari tells us, he had no bed but an old wooden chest, and was constrained to sit up for whole nights working for his living. When he placed himself under Verrocchio, or when he left him, no one knows. The very fact of a connection between the two artists. has been questioned. It is true, of course, that Verrocchio only practised painting incidentally and did not shine in that branch of art; by trade, we know, he was a goldsmith; he became a sculptor from inclination. Perugino, however, differing in this from the majority of truly universal and encyclopaedic artists of his time, was a painter and nothing else; why then should he have put himself under a

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