Madonna and Child

Andrea del Verrocchio ran the busiest workshop in Florence in the 1470s, a place where a boy named Leonardo da Vinci was learning to paint alongside the young Botticelli and Perugino. This tempera Madonna belongs to those years. Verrocchio was trained above all as a sculptor, and it shows in the painting. The Virgin and the seated Child are modelled with a firm, almost carved solidity, set against a dark ground so the pale faces come forward like relief. Scholars still argue over how much of such panels the master painted himself and how much fell to his gifted assistants. Leonardo, then in his early twenties, was among them.