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So I shall come into the Proconsolo beside the Bargello, where so many great and splendid people are remembered, and she, too, who is so beautiful that for her sake we forget everything else, Vanna degli Albizzi, who married Lorenzo de' Tornabuoni, whom Verrocchio carved and Ghirlandajo painted. Then I shall follow the Via del Corso past S. Margherita, close to Dante's mythical home, into Via Calzaioli, the busiest street of the city, and I shall think of the strange difference between these three great ways, Via del Proconsolo, Via Calzaioli, and Via Tornabuoni, which mark and divide the most ancient city. I shall turn toward Or San Michele, where on St. John's Day the banners of the guilds are displayed above the statues, and for a little time I shall look again on Verrocchio's Christ and St. Thomas. Then in this pilgrimage of remembrance I shall pass up Via Calzaioli, past the gay cool caffè of Gilli, into the Piazza del Duomo. And again, I shall fear lest the tower may fall like a lopped lily, and I shall wish that Giotto had made it ever so little bigger at the base. Then I shall pass to the right past the Misericordia, where for sure I shall meet some of the confraternit
That perspective, for instance, how good it is: almost as good as Verrocchio's work, and those dancing angiolini; yes, Verrocchio might have thought of them himself.
I see them both but particularly perhaps Verrocchio's in the intervals of strife most acceptably holding up a lady's train, or lying at her feet reading one of Boccaccio's stories; neither could ever have watched a flock. Donatello's second David, behind the more famous one, has more reality; but I would put Michelangelo's smaller one first. And what beautiful marble it is so rich and warm!
Long ago I expressed my conviction that the "Sherman Monument" is third in rank of the great equestrian statues of the world. To-day I am not sure that that conviction remains unaltered. Donatello's "Gattamelata" is unapproached and unapproachable in its quiet dignity; Verrocchio's "Colleone" is unsurpassed in picturesque attractiveness. Both are consecrated by the admiration of centuries.
Verrocchio's true pupil, if we may call him a pupil of any master at all who was an universal genius, wayward and altogether personal in everything he did, was Leonardo da Vinci. It is the Adoration of the Magi , scarcely more than a shadow, begun in 1478. Leonardo was a wanderer all his life, an engineer, a musician, a sculptor, an architect, a mathematician, as well as a painter.
Not the ball we see now, which was struck by lightning and hurled into the street in 1492. Verrocchio's was rather smaller than the present ball. See Crowe and Cavalcaselle, History of Painting in Italy: London, 1903, p. 116, note 4. See pp. 283-289.
"All of these masters have given proof of their excellence in the Chapel of Pope Sixtus, excepting Filippino, and also in the Spedaletto of the Magnifico Laurentio, and their merit is almost equal." This intimation seems to have decided Lodovico to apply to Perugino, whom Leonardo had known as his fellow-pupil in Verrocchio's atelier at Florence, and who was supposed to be in Venice at the time.
Over the great door where of old was set the monogram of Christ, you may read still REX REGUM ET DOMINUS DOMINANTIUM, and within the gate is a court most splendid and lovely, built after the design of Arnolfo, and once supported by his pillars of stone, but now the columns of Michelozzo, made in 1450, and covered with stucco decoration in the sixteenth century, form the cortile in which, over the fountain of Vasari, Verrocchio's lovely Boy Playing with the Dolphin ever half turns in his play.
The halo with which the Byzantine mosaïcists surrounded the faces of their saints, the glory of golden light that gleams about the figure of Christ in heaven in Tintoretto's decorations, the blank bright walls of the Doge's palace undermined by darkling and shadowy arcades, the refrain of a Provençal song, the sharp shadow under the visor of Verrocchio's equestrian statue, the thought-provoking chiaroscuro of Rembrandt's figure paintings these expedients are all designed to attract attention to the essential elements of a whole of many parts.
Vischer makes a strong point of this, as a proof of Verrocchio's influence on Signorelli, but to me it seems that feeling, types of face, and especially the broad and simple treatment of the draperies are entirely different. The most important of these frescoes, however, as best illustrating Signorelli's own peculiar tendencies, is "The Conversion of Saul," in the compartment over the door.
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