Page:Biographical catalogue of the principal Italian painters.djvu/227

 190 VERRIO— VERROCCHIO. at Burleigh House alone, says I>r. Waagen, Verrio received more money than Raphael or Michelangelo were paid for all their paintings put together: he received 18,000/., besides his keep, and a carriage at. his disposal. Verrio, says Walpole, though he possessed little invention and less taste, was an excellent painter for the sort of sub- jects on which he was employed — gods, goddesses, kings, emperors, and triumphs ; which he poured over those public surfaces on which the eye never rests long enough to criticise — ceilings and staircases. The New Testament or the Roman History cost him no- thing but ultramarine ; that, and mar- ble columns and marble steps, he never spared. The staircase at Hampton Court is one of his last and worst works ; an altar-piece of the Incredu- lity of St. Thomas, at Ghatsworth, is one of his best. (Dominici, Walpole.) VERROCCHIO, Andrea del, 6. at Florence, 1432, d. at Venice, 1488. Tuscan School. He was the scholar of Donatello, and was painter, sculptor, goldsmith, and architect He was much more distinguished as a sculptor than as a painter : in the former branch he was already an artist of reputation in 1472, when he completed the bronze sepulchre of Giovanni and Piero de' Medici, in San Lorenzo, at Florence. In 1474 he made the bronze beU, en- riched with figures and ornaments, of the abbey of Montescalari ; in 1476, the David, in the gallery of the Uffizj ; and in 1479 he was invited to Venice, to make the equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni. He executed also some works at Rome for Sixtus IV. Verrocchio caught cold Vhen casting the Colleoni statue, and died before it was finished; it was completed by Alessandro Leopardi, and fixed in its place in 1495. Leopardi has inscribed his own name on the saddle girth. When Verrocchio had completed the horse, he was surprised to hear that Vellano, of Padua, was to make the figure of Colleoni ; this so exasperated him that he destroyed the head of the horse and fled, and the Venetian Sig- nory sent him an intimation that he had better not return to Venice if he valued his head. He replied, that he would treasure their admonition; for they were as incapable of restoring him his head as they were of finding another fit for his horse. The Signoiy, how- ever, substituted persuasion for threats, and induced him to return and under- take the completion of the work. The anatomical knowledge of the form which his profession as a sculp- tor demanded and developed, Ver- rocchio applied to painting; bnt his pictures are extremely scarce. He is said, by Vasari, to have been the first, or, according to Bottari, only one of the first, who took plaster casts from the limbs, living and dead, to serve as models for art studies : it was a practice familiar te the ancient Greeks. There is a picture of the Baptism of Christ, by Andrea, in the Academy at Florence, in which the figure of an angel, according to Vasari, is the work of Verrocchio's scholar, Leonardo da Vinci, which, the story says, so far STur- passed the other parts of the picture, , that Andrea resolved never again to undertake any commissions in paint- ing; the figure in question, however, ' shows no marked superiority, and the story, like many similar traditions, has doubtless less fact than fiction. Ver- rocchio was then at the summit of his reputation as a sculptor in bronze, and was so completely occupied that he can have had Httle time for painting. Like his eminent scholar, he was a skilful musician. His principid work is, per- haps, the great group of the Incredulity of St. Thomas, in the church of Or San Michele, at Florenoei finished in