Die Taufe Christi

This picture came out of Verrocchio's Florence workshop in the early 1470s, and workshops then ran as teams, the master laying out the design and his pupils filling in parts of it. Verrocchio was a sculptor and goldsmith as much as a painter, and you can feel it in the firm, carved figures of Christ and John at the river. But your eye keeps drifting to the two kneeling angels on the left, and especially the one seen from behind, softer, more alive, its hair and drapery handled with a delicacy the rest of the panel doesn't have. That angel was painted by an apprentice in the shop, a young Leonardo da Vinci, probably in his early twenties. Giorgio Vasari, writing decades later, told the story that when Verrocchio saw what his pupil had done he gave up painting for good. Vasari never knew Leonardo and liked a good tale, so take it lightly. But stand in front of the panel and the difference between the two hands is genuinely there to see.