圣母与端坐的圣婴

Andrea del Verrocchio ran the busiest workshop in Florence around 1470, a place that turned out bronze, marble and paint, and where a teenage Leonardo da Vinci was learning the trade. Because so much left that shop under his name, scholars still argue over which panels he actually painted with his own hand. This Berlin Madonna is the rare one nearly everyone accepts as his. The Virgin looks down at the Christ child, who sits upright on a marble ledge, and behind them an arch opens onto a distant river landscape. Verrocchio was a sculptor first, and you can feel it in the solid, carved weight of the figures and in the sharp architecture. It was painted in tempera, the older egg-based technique, just as the oil painting Leonardo would go on to master was arriving in Florence.