For Italy and for much of the world this is Leonardo’s year – the five hundredth anniversary of the death, as treasured guest of King Francis I at his Amboise palace, of perhaps the greatest polymath genius the world has known.

If curiosity killed the cat then it fed Leonardo’s mind, transporting it light years away from the often heavily blinkered universe he was born into.

All masters must be pupils first and Leonardo’s master was Andrea Verrocchio who began as a goldsmith, transferred to his greatest love, sculpture,

 

found time to paint a handful of pictures worthy to stand besides those of his main contemporaries, Ghirlandaio and Botticelli, and frescoed monasteries:

 

(Note the similarity between Verocchio’s and Leonardo’s Saint Jerome.)

Several of these paintings show the touch of an apprentice Leonardo. None more so that the two angels in Verrocchio’s baptism of Christ, in the Uffizi gallery of Florence.

 

It’s those angels in this painting which fully show the emerging genius of Leonardo and his particular speciality in their enigmatic smiles and their intricate drapery. Florence’s Strozzi palace exhibition, which is on until 14 July, celebrates Andrea Del Verrocchio as Leonardo’s teacher placing the young da Vinci in the context of the Italian renaissance and, in particular as one brought up in the colourful decorative Florentine school.

The exhibition, which has a special section at the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, brings together for the first time Verrocchio’s celebrated masterpieces and works by the best-known artists connected with his workshop in the second half of the 15th century. These include Domenico Ghirlandaio, Sandro Botticelli, Pietro Perugino and ….Leonardo da Vinci, his most famous pupil.

Here is a selection of paintings by those connected with Verrocchio’s workshop.

 

And here is the hand of Leonardo in this drawing of entwining grasses – he loved interweaving motifs – witness also his drawings of tresses and branches

– indeed, in Milan’s Castello Sforzesco there’s a whole room he frescoed which transforms that space into a tangled forest.

The greatest treasure is left for the last exhibition room. It’s a terracotta sculpture of the Madonna and child from London’s V and A which stubbornly still attributes it to Rossellino despite its quite obvious Leonardesque features. Just that quizzical smile of the virgin gives it away!

 

It’s sometimes said that only one of Leonardo’s sculptures survives to this day. I believe there are three. In addition to the Virgin and child there’s an extraordinary Annunciation in the church of San Gennaro only a few miles away from us, near Collodi.

 

You can read more on this work in my post at

https://longoio2.wordpress.com/2015/04/07/crossing-over-at-villa-bove-san-gennaro/

There’s also another sculpture which is never seen as it’s locked away in some private collector’s vault. (Rather sad, this fact).

I shall ever remain in awe of Leonardo and just wish he’d completed a few more of his projects. Surely with da Vinci’s creative mathematical sense he might have explored the musical world and written something for the voice or for the instruments he invented? Who knows? Great geniuses shall ever be enveloped in the draperies of arcane secrets. It’s surely a great idea to walk the hills where the great enigma was born and brought up as we did and which is described in my post at:

https://longoio.wordpress.com/2013/04/25/a-walk-in-leonardo-da-vincis-hills/