When we speak of Leonardo ‘entering the studio’ of Andrea del Verrocchio we should avoid extraneous notions of what an artist’s studio was and what it looked like. The word generally used in Leonardo’s day was bottega, which means simply a shop or a workshop. This conveys well enough the daily reality of Verrocchio’s studio. It was a workshop or indeed a small factory devoted to the production of works of art. Some studios were specialist, but Verrocchio’s was decidedly not. Over the years it produced paintings of various types and sizes; sculptures in marble, bronze, wood and terracotta; goldwork, silverwork and ironwork; tombstones, marriage-chests, jousting-pennants, heraldic devices, suits of armour, and theatrical sets and costumes. It was a commercial operation – Kenneth Clark has dubbed the studio ‘Verrocchio & Co.’ – and from Vasari onward there has been a tendency to think of Verroc chio as more a master-craftsman than a ‘great artist’. ‘The style of his sculpture and painting tended to be hard and crude,’ opined Vasari, ‘since it came from unremitting study rather than any inborn gift.’26
Though best known as a sculptor, Verrocchio had actually trained as a goldsmith, and was a member of the goldsmiths’ guild. In this he followed Brunelleschi, Donatello, Ghiberti, Antonio del Pollaiuolo and Ghirlandaio, who all trained first as goldsmiths. One of his masters was a certain Francesco di Luca Verrocchio, from whom he took his professional name (his real name was Andrea di Cione). It was not unusual for an apprentice to adopt his master’s name: to become, within the ambit of trade secrets, his ‘son’ – a trope of initiation. The name of Piero di Cosimo, for instance, signifies that he is the ‘son’ of his master, Cosimo Rosselli. In one of the earliest references to Verrocchio as an independent artist he is styled Verrocchino or ‘Little Verrocchio’. He in turn became one of the foremost teachers of his generation. As well as Leonardo, his pupils and assistants included the painters Pietro Vanucci (known as Perugino) and Lorenzo di Credi, and the sculptor Agnolo di Polo, and he seems to have had good relations with other independent artists like Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Francesco Botticini, Biagio d’Antonio and Francesco di Simone Ferrucci, all of whom were associated with his workshop at one time or another.
Verrocchio’s bottega was in the parish of Sant’Ambrogio, towards the eastern flank of the city walls. He was a local boy – he was born and raised here, and though he died in Venice his body was brought back to be buried, next to his father, in the parish church. He was born sometime between 1434 and 1437, and was thus about thirty when he became Leonardo’s master. His father, Michele, is documented as a fornaciaio or kiln-worker, as Leonardo’s stepfather Accattabriga had been; his elder brother, Simone, entered the church. The family home still stands, deduced from documents to be the tall house on the north-western corner of Via del Agnolo and Via de’ Macci. Verrocchio’s bottega was close by, on Via Ghibellina, close to the forbidding, windowless walls of the city’s prison, Le Stinche, which stood on the present-day site of the Teatro Verdi.27
The studio where Leonardo began his apprenticeship was just a short walk from Ser Piero da Vinci’s offices opposite the Bargello. This suggests the intimacy of the city – the physical closeness of family and work, everyone in walking and talking distance of each other – but in these crowded cities there are invisible social boundaries, and you would have crossed one as you walked out from the well-appointed city centre into the crowded, artisan neighbourhood of Sant’Ambrogio. The names of the streets give a flavour of the area – on Via della Salvia, where sage and other herbs were once sold, we get a smell of the area. A speciality of the neighbourhood was earthenware: you went to Via dei Pentolini for the small two-handled cooking-pots of that name, and to Via delle Conche for larger washing-pots. North of the church was Via della Mattonaia, or Brickworks Street, perhaps the site of Michele di Cione’s business as a fornaciaio. Moving on east towards the walls you arrived at a pair of rather grim-looking convents formurate – immured nuns or anchoresses. At the Monasterio delle Murate were 150 nuns; they passed their time making silver and gold embroidery, for which Savonarola reproved them. Next to it was the convent of Santa Verdiana, named after the anchoress par excellence, St Verdiana of Castelfiorentina, a thirteenth-century murata who is said to have lived for thirty-four years in a walled-up cell with only two snakes for company. Beyond the city gate – the Porta alla Croce – was greenery and space: how often Leonardo must have walked there to clear his head.28
Andrea’s studio cannot be tied to a precise building on Via Ghibellina, but we know broadly what it looked like. The typical bottega was a large, open space on the ground floor, opening on to the street, usually with living-quarters at the back or upstairs. Walking between Sant’Ambrogio and Santa Croce you can still see vestiges of botteghe. Old arched entranceways are visible in the brickwork, and sometimes there is a pizzeria or laundromat or car-repair shop where the interior shape has been preserved: the low, vaulted ceiling; the workspace stretching back the whole width of the building to a glimpse of the yard out back. From a doorway on Via delle Casine comes the sound of hammering, the flare of a welding-torch. Thus Leonardo’s first experiences of artistic life in c. 1466: physical, dusty, noisy; the penetrating smells of varnishes and solvents; more like a kind of garage than a studio.
At this time Andrea del Verrocchio was in the first flush of success. In 1467, a busy year, he was completing work on Cosimo de’ Medici’s tomb in the Medici church of San Lorenzo, and beginning work on one of his sculptural masterpieces, the large bronze group of Christ and St Thomas for one of the exterior niches of Orsanmichele. Both these were plum commissions. The sculpture was commissioned by the powerful Tribunale della Mercanzia, the law-court for cases involving guildsmen and traders – an organization with which his ‘good friend’ Ser Piero da Vinci had connections. At the convent of San Marco, he was also involved in the casting and mounting of an enormous bronze bell, later known as La Piagnona after the followers of Savonarola, thepiagnoni or weepers.
Another famous Verrocchio bronze has recently been dated back to this period, and is of particular interest because it is possible that Leonardo was the model for it. This is Verrocchio’s David. It is just over 4 feet tall, and shows David as a wiry, curly-haired youth with the profusely bearded head of Goliath at his feet. Traces remain of what was probably extensive gilding on the figure’s boots, armour and hair. The sculpture is now in the Bargello, just a few hundred yards from where it was created. It is sometimes dated to the mid-1470s, because in 1476 it was sold by Lorenzo de’ Medici to the Signoria, but the Verrocchio expert Andrew Butterfield has shown that on stylistic grounds it is much earlier. He dates it to c. 1466: it was perhaps a commission by Lorenzo’s father, Piero, for the garden of the Medici villa at Careggi.29 If this date is right, the statue belongs to Leonardo’s earliest days at the bottega. What could be more natural than that this handsome new assistant should be the model for the boy-warrior David? That Leonardo was a beautiful youth is stated by all the early biographers. A visual comparison of the David with the probable self-portrait in the Adoration, c. 1481, adds some conviction to this. There is no early documentation to support the idea, but it is persuasively possible that Verrocchio’s graceful, skinny, wavy-haired ragazzo is the fourteen-year-old Leonardo.
Verrocchio’s bronze David, c. 1466, and a study of a young man in the pose of David from the Ferrucci sketchbook.
If it is, we have another likeness of him (though a second-hand one) in a pen-and-ink drawing of a naked young man in the exact pose of Verrocchio’s David. This drawing is now in the Louvre. It was formerly part of a sketchbook, now dispersed, belonging to the Florentine sculptor Francesco di Simone Ferrucci. On another page of the sketchbook Ferrucci notes that Lorenzo di Credi – another pupil of Verrocchio’s – has furnished him with some of Verrocchio’s ‘models’ (clay figures, drawings, templates) to copy. On yet another page, among some sketches of an angel, is a line of right-to-left handwriting that looks remarkably like Leonardo’s. The precise date of the sketchbook is uncertain: the mention of Credi cannot be much earlier than the late 1470s, and some of the pages have written material dated 1487–8.30 The drawing is unlikely to be a direct study of the young model who stood for David, but is plausibly a later copy by Ferrucci of one of Verrocchio’s own preparatory sketches for the sculpture. Thus filtered and approximated, and with some guesswork thrown in, it shows us the young Leonardo da Vinci standing naked in the studio on Via Ghibellina.
Nothing expresses more pungently, or more poignantly, the reality of the Florentine artist’s studio than the inventory of Verrocchio’s possessions left at his bottega after his death in 1488. This is not the bottega on Via Ghibellina – he had moved to a more central location near the Duomo sometime before 1480 – but the address does not really matter. I transcribe the list exactly, with its modulations intact. There was a feather bed, a white bed-cover, a mattress, a pair of sheets, a painted bed-frame, a dining-table, a bench for the table, a well-bucket, a chest to keep grain in, a jar of oil, three casks containing 14 barrels of wine, a large cask of vinegar wine (agresto), a model of the cupola (of the cathedral), a fine lute, a Bible in the vernacular, a copy of the Cento novelle, a printedMoscino, Petrarch’s Trionfi, the Pistole of Ovid, a picture of the head of Andrea, a terracotta of a baby, a large painting, a sphere, two old chests, a figure of St John, two pairs of bellows worth 15 florins, two pairs of small bellows, two heads in half-relief, an anvil, a sculpture of Our Lady, a head in profile, two porphyry pestles, a pair of pincers, a funeral monument for the Cardinal of Pistoia, a large sculpted figure, three rough-cast putti and their clay models, various hammers of various sizes, a kiln with various iron tools, a quantity of firewood of pine and other sorts, and five moulds for making cannon-balls both large and small.31
Amid the domestic lumber and artistic equipment, a couple of items catch the eye. The ‘fine lute’ confirms Vasari’s statement that Verrocchio was a musician; it is possible that Leonardo’s musical skills developed under Verrocchio’s aegis. The books also give us a sense of the mental texture of the bottega. Three of them are well-known works of a cultivated but popular sort: leisure reading. There is the Cento novelle, a collection of stories by the fourteenth-century Florentine novelist Franco Sacchetti, closely modelled on Boccaccio. There is Petrarch’s Trionfi (Triumphs): moralistic poems in terzine. And there is an edition of the Pistole, or Epistles, of Ovid, also known as the Eroides, probably in the Italian translation by Luca Pulci published in Florence in 1481. Leonardo himself later owned a copy of this, as well as a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.32 The other book mentioned among Verrocchio’s effects – the ‘printed Moscino’ – may be Leon Battista Alberti’s Mosca (The Fly), a humorous work based on Lucian’sLaus muscae (In Praise of the Fly).
The mention of a portrait or self-portrait (‘a picture of the head of Andrea’) in the inventory is tantalizing. It is unlikely to be the half-length oil-portrait in the Uffizi, showing a dark, thin-lipped man with a rather dour expression. This is often said to be a portrait of Verrocchio, but it more probably depicts Verrocchio’s sometime pupil Perugino – its similarity to the signed self-portrait of Perugino in the Collegio di Cambio in Perugia is striking.33 There is a woodcut portrait of Verrocchio in Vasari’s Lives, apparently showing him in middle age. Some of these woodcuts, produced en masse in the late 1560s, are pure guesswork as portraits, but in this case the image leads us to another. The face has strong similarities to a powerful pen-and-ink portrait in the Uffizi which is certainly of the Verrocchio school (see page 86). This may well be a portrait of Verrocchio: it would show him around the age of forty. It is not a handsome face – broad, double-chinned, faintly epicene – but the intensity of the gaze is startling. This drawing is not itself the item listed in the inventory (which is described as a quadro, and was therefore a painted portrait), but it may be connected with it. It is as near as we get to a likeness of Leonardo’s teacher.