Andrea del Verrocchio

Sometime around 1466, a teenager named Leonardo, the illegitimate son of a Florentine notary, joined the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, then the busiest sculptor and painter in Florence, Italy. Verrocchio ran his workshop like a small factory, training apprentices in goldsmithing, bronze casting, drawing and painting at once, and Leonardo stayed there for roughly a decade, absorbing all of it.

Verrocchio's own output ranged just as widely, from the bronze statue of David now in Florence's Bargello museum, to the marble tomb of Piero and Giovanni de' Medici, sons of the city's ruling banking family, to paintings including the Baptism of Christ, on which Leonardo is recorded as having painted one of the kneeling angels. The 16th-century biographer Giorgio Vasari later claimed Verrocchio was so struck by his pupil's angel that he gave up painting for good, a story historians treat with some caution but that has stuck to Verrocchio's reputation ever since.

In his last years Verrocchio was in Venice casting a bronze equestrian statue of the mercenary general Bartolomeo Colleoni, a commission he never lived to see finished. He died there in 1488, and another sculptor completed and cast the statue after his death.