Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/315

1459-1537] his comrades in that famous bottega where so much of the finest art of the Renaissance had its birth. His gentle and affectionate nature endeared him to all his brother-artists, and made him an especial favourite with his master. In his widowed mother's income-tax return for the year 1480, Lorenzo, who was by this time twenty-one, is described as a painter working under Messer Andrea Verrocchio for a yearly salary of twelve florins—about twenty-four pounds. He must also have assisted his master in his sculptural works, for when Verrocchio died at Venice, in 1488, he recommended his pupil Lorenzo di Credi to the Doge and Signory as the artist best fitted to complete his unfinished statue of Bartolommeo Colleoni. Lorenzo, who had remained at Florence in charge of Andrea's shop, hastened to Venice on hearing of his master's death, and brought back Andrea's body to be buried in Florence. But the casting of the great equestrian statue in bronze was a task beyond his powers, and the work was ultimately entrusted to the Venetian Leopardo. Andrea had further shown his confidence in his favourite scholar by appointing him executor of his will and leaving him the stock of metal and other contents of his shop as well as his household goods, both in Florence and Venice. After his return home, Lorenzo never left Florence, where he became Verrocchio's recognised successor, and was held in high esteem by his fellow-citizens.

The range of his art was almost exclusively limited to panels of sacred subjects, chiefly Madonnas and Saints, Nativities or Annunciations. According to Vasari, he began by copying Madonnas of Verrocchio and Leonardo for the King of Spain, and did his work so well