Donatello did not, in the strict sense of the term, found a school.[93] Andrea Verocchio, goldsmith, painter, and worker in bronze, was the most distinguished of his pupils.  To all the arts he practised, Verocchio applied limited powers, a meagre manner, and a prosaic mind.  Yet few men have exercised at a very critical moment a more decided influence.  The mere fact that he numbered Lionardo da Vinci, Lorenzo di Credi, and Pietro Perugino among his scholars, proves the esteem of his contemporaries; and when we have observed that the type of face selected by Lionardo and transmitted to his followers, appears also in the pictures of Lorenzo di Credi and is first found in the “David” of Verocchio, we have a right to affirm that the master of these men was an artist of creative genius as well as a careful workman.  Florence still points with pride to the “Incredulity of Thomas” on the eastern wall of Orsammichele, to the “Boy and Dolphin” in the court of the Palazzo Vecchio, and to the “David” of this sculptor:  but the first is spoiled by heaviness and angularity of drapery; the second, though fanciful and marked by fluttering movement, is but a caprice; the third outdoes the hardest work of Donatello by its realism.  Verocchio’s “David,” a lad of some seventeen years, has the lean, veined arms of a stone-hewer or gold-beater.  As a faithful portrait of the first Florentine prentice who came to hand, this statue might have merit but for the awkward cuirass and kilt that partly drape the figure.

The name of Verocchio is best known to the world through the equestrian statue of Bartolommeo Colleoni.  When this great Condottiere, the last surviving general trained by Braccio da Montone, died in 1475, he bequeathed a large portion of his wealth to Venice, on condition that his statue on horseback should be erected in the Piazza di S. Marco.  Colleoni, having long held the baton of the Republic, desired that after death his portrait, in his habit as he lived, should continue to look down on the scene of his old splendour.  By an ingenious quibble the Senators adhered to the letter of his will without infringing a law that forbade them to charge the square of S. Mark with monuments.  They ruled that the piazza in front of the Scuola di S. Marco, better known as the Campo di S. Zanipolo, might be chosen as the site of Colleoni’s statue, and to Andrea Verocchio was given the commission for its erection.

Andrea died in 1488 before the model for the horse was finished.  The work was completed, and the pedestal was supplied by Alessandro Leopardi.  To Verocchio, profiting by the example of Donatello’s “Gattamelata,” must be assigned the general conception of this statue; but the breath of life that animates both horse and rider, the richness of detail that enhances the massive grandeur of the group, and the fiery spirit of its style of execution were due to the Venetian genius of Leopardi.  Verocchio alone produced nothing so truly magnificent.