Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 25, 2025
In two reliefs of Madonna and Child, one in marble and one in terra-cotta, you find that strange smile again, not, as with Leonardo, some radiance of the soul visible for a moment on the lips, but the smile of a mother happy with her little son. In the two Tornabuoni reliefs that we find here too in the Bargello, it is not Verrocchio's hand we see; but in the group of Christ and St.
In addition to originals there are at South Kensington casts of many of the Bargello's most valuable possessions, such as Donatello's and Verrocchio's Davids, Donatello's Baptist and many heads, Mino da Fiesole's best Madonna, Pollaiuolo's Young Warrior, and so forth; so that to loiter there is most attractively to recapture something of the Florentine feeling. S. Croce
The people of the Middle Ages were too grievously ill grown, distorted, hideous, to be otherwise than indecent in nudity; they may have had an instinct of the kind, and, ugly as they knew themselves to be, they must yet have found in forms like those of Verrocchio's David insufficient beauty to give much pleasure.
The three figures turned toward each other with heads on the same level make almost a square space-shape, although it might be said that the central player gives a pyramidal foundation. This last may also be said of Verrocchio's "Tobias and the Archangels" in the Florence Academy, for the square, or other rectangle, is again lengthened by the pyramidal shape of the two central figures.
On entering the Palazzo Vecchio we come instantly to one of the most charming things in Florence Verrocchio's fountain which stands in the midst of the courtyard.
Donatello's David might be the young lord; Verrocchio's, his page. Here we see the new spirit, the Renaissance, at work, for though religion called it into being and the Church continued to be its patron, it rapidly divided into two halves, and while the painters were bringing all their genius to glorify sacred history, the scholars were endeavouring to humanize it.
These two are perhaps the finest of the series, and are, besides, dramatic in gesture and expression. The composition of the last is, with evident intention, borrowed from Verrocchio's group on the walls of Or San Michele, Florence, but the likeness ends with the general lines of composition.
More perfect in craftsmanship and in the knowledge of anatomy than Donatello, Verrocchio here, where he seems almost to have been inspired by the David of his master, surpasses him in energy and beauty, and while Donatello's figure is involved with the head of Goliath, so that the feet are lost in the massive and almost shapeless bronze, Verrocchio's David stands clear of the grim and monstrous thing at his feet.
Piero di Cosimo is here, religious and not mythological; and here are a very straightforward and satisfying Mariotto Albertinelli the "Virgin and S. Elizabeth," very like a Fra Bartolommeo; a very rich and beautiful "Deposition" by Botticini, one of Verrocchio's pupils, with a gay little predella underneath it, and a pretty "Holy Family" by Franciabigio. But Andrea remains the king of the walls.
The exquisite cornice is Michelozzo's original, and the courtyard has merely lost its statues, among which are Donatello's Judith, now in the Loggia de' Lanzi, and his bronze David, now in the Bargello, while Verrocchio's David was probably on the stairs. The escutcheon on the corner of the house gives us the period of its erection. The seven plain balls proclaim it Cosimo's.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking