Renaissance_ A Short History, The - Johnson, Paul [31]
Nevertheless, in Italy at any rate the lead went increasingly to sculptors who aimed much higher, and especially to those who could produce the independent standing figure or, better still, the man on horseback. Halfway between the two sculptural giants Donatello and Michelangelo stands Andrea del Verrocchio (1435–88), yet another Florentine. His father was a brickmaker, perhaps a decorative one, and he was associated from an early age with the goldsmiths who, in Florence particularly, provided the skilled and experimental environment from which so many great artists came. It is important to remember that most of the visually creative Renaissance leaders were artists in the widest sense: they could and often did turn their hands to architecture as well as painting and sculpture, to designs for almost any kind of artifact that required exceptional skill—to anything, in fact, for which there was or could be a market. If Verrocchio began as a goldsmith, he quickly turned to sculpture as well, competing for major commissions, and became involved in a number of different metal projects, such as creating the giant copper ball for the lantern of Florence Cathedral. When he was senior enough to run a workshop of his own, which was also a retail shop where clients could come to buy, order copies or commission works of their choosing, he and his assistants worked in virtually all media and materials, from jewelry to massive bronzes and marbles, as well as monumental paintings. His range and versatility—and enterprise—were reasons why so many talented young men, like Leonardo da Vinci, Perugino and Lorenzo di Credi, to list only the most celebrated, came to learn under his direction. Indeed, so successful was his shop that he opened another one in Venice.
Florentine artists, especially sculptors and painters, were highly competitive, and were encouraged to be so by their patrons, both municipal and private. Verrocchio was among the most competitive of all, both with other workshops, like that run by the Pollaiuolo brothers, and with individual artists, living or dead. His Boy with a Dolphin (Palazzo Vecchio, Florence) was an attempt to take over and surpass a favorite theme of antiquity, and a highly successful one. His David (Bargello) was a deliberate challenge to the youthful charm of the marvelous Donatello statue, and may well have been more popular in its day, for it is far more virile, and the detail is superb. His masterpiece, on which he spent much of the last decade of his life, was also an effort to surpass Donatello. Mounted figures, cast in bronze, life-size or larger, were regarded as one of the greatest achievements of antiquity. The four antique horses on St. Mark’s in Venice, stolen from Constantinople, were reminders of how difficult it was to sculpt and cast even unmounted equine statues. One of Donatello’s greatest achievements, in the decade 1445–55, was successfully to create a mounted figure, the Gattamelata, in front of the great church of St. Anthony in Padua. Verrocchio now outdid this, with his magnificent rendering of the mounted warlord Bartolomeo Colleoni, erected at one of the most prominent sites in Venice, just outside the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo. Technically it is a masterwork. Aesthetically, it is formidable, bringing out the terrifying brutality of the men who conducted warfare in the Renaissance. Indeed, it has some claims to be the most successful, as well as the best known, of all mounted statues, and helps one to understand how Verrocchio contrived to extract such huge prices (up to 350 florins) from his patrons.
One can probably learn more about Renaissance art from a detailed study of this industrious man’s shops than from any other single institution. Behind the actual output were the preparatory