Andrea del Verrocchio

The impossibility of excelling the perfect beauty of the Greek and Roman statues, many of which still existed, eventually led in sculpture as in architecture to a blind imitation of the classical models, but not until some of the greatest sculptors of all ages had given their works to the world.

Ghiberti, thirteen seventy-eight to fourteen fifty-five, famous for the casting of the bronze gates of the Baptistery in Florence, Donatello, thirteen eighty-six to fourteen sixty-six, the sculptor of two of the most popular statues in the world, the Mercury and the St. George in Florence, Luca della Robbia, fourteen hundred to eighty-two, best known in connection with Robbia ware, Verrocchio, fourteen thirty-eight to eighty-eight, probably the modeler of the famous equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni at Venice, and the last, Michelangelo, fourteen seventy-five to fifteen sixty-four, great as architect, painter, and poet, but greatest of all as sculptor.

Yet it is neither architecture nor sculpture, but painting, that furnishes the best expression of the Renaissance spirit in Italy.

In the Middle Ages, painting had been so bound down in the service of the Church by conventional rules that it was both unnatural and lifeless, in spite of the revivals of Cimabue and Giotto in Florence in the early 14th century.

He barely noticed the great forces of the age which in life he encountered.

After the first promise of his boyhood in the Tuscan hills, his youth at Florence had been spent under Verrocchio as a master, in company with those whose names were later to brighten the pages of Italian art.

he must then have heard savonarola's impassioned sermons yet unlike botticelli remained dumb to his entreaties he must have seen lorenzo the magnificent but there was little opening in the medicean circle for the young painter who had first to gain fame abroad the splendour of milan under il moro then the most brilliant court in europe attracted him he went there proclaiming his ability in a remarkable letter to accomplish much but desiring chiefly to erect a great monument to the glory of the sforza he spent years at that court taken up by his different ventures painting sculpture engineering even arranging festivals but his greater project was doomed to failure enmeshed in the downfall of ludovico Even to this he remained impassive.

Visconti dragged to prison, his son dead, the Duke has lost his state, his possessions, his liberty, and has finished nothing he undertook, was his only comment on his patron's end, written on the margin of a manuscript.

There was already a couple of bronze statues in Florence showing just that.

One by Verrocchio.

You don't need to remember that.

It won't be on the test.