Andrea del Verrocchio

1435-1488

One of the Greatest Painters Of All Time

  Florentine Painter of the  Early Renaissance

Influences - Donatello, Giotto Bondone, Jan Van Eyke, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and Classical Greek Art

Education - apprenticed to a goldsmith Giuliano Verrocchio

Cause of Death - According to Renaissance biographer Giorgio Vasari when reminiscing about  Andrea del Verrocchio untimely demise  "So he mended his first model, and cast it in bronze; but he did not perfectly finish it, for being heated in casting it, he caught a chill, of which he died in a few days."

About The Artist

Verrocchio' s workshop was the first one in Florence where oil-painting was systematically carried on. He also guided Florence landscape painting into new paths. In contrast to the earlier Florentines, who had lost themselves in elaborate detail and caused the  most distant objects to gleam in unbroken colors. Verrocchio had a taste for simple plains, which he depicted with certain plein air tendencies. His favorite hour was the twilight, when the trees stand out in black from the light grey heaven and the cool moisture sinks over withered dusty plains.  But even more characteristic of the impression of his pictures is the dainty grace which he endeavors to render facial expressions and motion. While the figures of Donatello and Castigno hold their hands wide open and extend the second finger, Verrocchio merely bend the little finger -- a detail which alone is significant of the change of taste; there, energy; here, an almost effected delicacy.  Noli me tangere is the inscription upon his portrait of Pippo Spano, though in a very different since. Verrocchio himself felt what a delicate, fragile ideal he substituted for the mighty, powerful figures of the older masters. He was the first to depict a dainty Christ child in place of a robust, healthy child; to give to the features of the Madonna a touch of that soft enchanting smile associated with Leonardo's name. -- Richard Muther, The History of Modern Painting, Henry and Co., London, 1896

VERROCCHIO’S LANDSCAPE PAINTING TEQNIQUES

Art historian, Bernhard Berenson,
 states "Verrocchio the first to feel that a faithful reproduction of the contours is not landscape, that the painting of nature is an art distinct from the painting of the figure. He scarcely knew where the difference lay, but felt that light and atmosphere play an entirely different part in each, and that in landscape these have at least as much importance as tactile values. A vision of plein air, vague I must grant, seems to have hovered before him, and, feeling his powerlessness to cope with it in full effects of light such as he attempted in his earlier pictures, he deliberately chose the twilight hour, when, in Tuscany, on fine days, the trees stand out almost black against a sky of light opalescent grey. To render this subduing, soothing effect of the coolness and the dew after the glare and dust of the day—the effect so matchlessly given in Gray’s “Elegy”—seemed to be his first desire as a painter, and in presence of his “Annunciation” (in the Uffizi), we feel that he succeeded as only one other Tuscan succeeded after him, that other being his own pupil Leonardo."

Key Descriptive Words  and Phrases associated with the Renaissance Movement   rebirth, rediscovery of the classical world,  publication of Della Pittura, a book about the laws of mathematical perspective for artists,  sfumato, chiaroscuro, Savonarola, spiritually significant,  illuminated manuscript,  idealized biblical themes, scriptorium, illuminator,  Age of Discovery, axonometric drawing, curiosity about the natural world, the works of Dante, realistic use of colors and  light, Bonfire of the Vanities, Old Testament stories, ethereal and foggy backgrounds, Gospel parables, The Black death, romanticized landscapes,  Christian symbolism.

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References - The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance
by Bernhard Berenson