It happened that Verrocchio was employed by the brethren of
Vallombrosa to paint the Baptism of Christ, and Leonardo was
allowed to finish an angel in the left-hand corner. It was one of
those moments in which the progress of a great thing--here, that
of the art of Italy--presses hard on the happiness of an individual,
through whose discouragement and decrease, humanity, in more
fortunate persons, comes a step nearer to its final success.
For beneath the cheerful exterior of the mere [102] well-paid
craftsman, chasing brooches for the copes of Santa Maria
Novella, or twisting metal screens for the tombs of the Medici,
lay the ambitious desire to expand the destiny of Italian art by a
larger knowledge and insight into things, a purpose in art not
unlike Leonardo's still unconscious purpose; and often, in the
modelling of drapery, or of a lifted arm, or of hair cast back from
the face, there came to him something of the freer manner and
richer humanity of a later age. But in this Baptism the pupil had
surpassed the master; and Verrocchio turned away as one
stunned, and as if his sweet earlier work must thereafter be
distasteful to him, from the bright animated angel of Leonardo's
hand.
The angel may still be seen in Florence, a space of sunlight in the
cold, laboured old picture; but the legend is true only in
sentiment, for painting had always been the art by which
Verrocchio set least store. And as in a sense he anticipates
Leonardo, so to the last Leonardo recalls the studio of
Verrocchio, in the love of beautiful toys, such as the vessel of
water for a mirror, and lovely needle-work about the implicated
hands in the Modesty and Vanity, and of reliefs, like those
cameos which in the Virgin of the Balances hang all round the
girdle of Saint Michael, and of bright variegated stones, such as
the agates in the Saint Anne, and in a hieratic preciseness and
grace, as of a sanctuary swept and [103] garnished.
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