Andrea del Verrocchio

Andrea del Verrocchio (/vəˈroʊkioʊ/ və-ROH-kee-oh, US also /-ˈrɔːk-/ -⁠RAW-, Italian: [anˈdrɛːa del verˈrɔkkjo]; born Andrea di Michele di Francesco de' Cioni; c. 1435 – 1488) was an Italian sculptor, painter and goldsmith who was a master of a workshop in Florence. He was the teacher of Leonardo da Vinci, who assisted in painting The Baptism of Christ.

He became known as Verrocchio after the surname of his master, a goldsmith. Few paintings are attributed to him with certainty, but his pupils also included Pietro Perugino and Lorenzo di Credi. As a sculptor, his best known work is the Equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni in Venice.

Verrocchio was born in Florence in around 1435. His father, Michele di Francesco Cioni, initially worked as a tile and brick maker, then later as a tax collector. Verrocchio never married, and had to provide financial support for some members of his family. He was at first apprenticed to a goldsmith. It has been suggested that he was later apprenticed to Donatello, but there is no evidence of this and John Pope-Hennessy considered that it is contradicted by the style of his early works. It has been suggested that he was trained as a painter under Fra Filippo Lippi.

Little is known about his life. His main works are dated in his last twenty years and his advancement owed much to the patronage of Lorenzo de' Medici and his son Piero. His workshop was in Florence where he was a member of the Guild of St Luke. Several great artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Lorenzo di Credi passed through his workshop as apprentices. Beyond this, artists like Domenico Ghirlandaio, Francesco Botticini, and Pietro Perugino were also involved and their early works can be hard to distinguish from works by Verrocchio. Giovanni Santi records that Botticelli, Luca Signorelli, and a young Filippino Lippi also visited or worked in Verrocchio's studio. Of the artist's pedagogy the Florentine poet Ugolino Verino wrote: "Whatever painters have that is good they drank from Verrocchio's spring".

At the end of his life, Verrocchio opened a new workshop in Venice, where he was working on the statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni, leaving the Florentine workshop in charge of Lorenzo di Credi. He died in Venice in 1488.

Despite the importance of Verrocchio's workshop in the training of younger painters, very few paintings are universally recognised as his own work and there are many problems of attribution.

A painting of the Madonna with Seated Child in tempera on panel (now in the Gemäldegalerie of Berlin State Museums) is considered an early work of 1468–1470.

A painting in the National Gallery in London (cat. no.NG2508) of the Virgin and Child with Two Angels in tempera on panel, which had not previously been attributed to Verrocchio, was cleaned and restored about 2010 and is now attributed to him with a date of about 1467–1469.