It is, however, in the work of another goldsmith—­or at least the pupil of one, whose name he took—­that we find the greatest master of the new age, Andrea Verrocchio.  Born in 1435, and dead in 1488, he was preoccupied all his life with the fierce splendour of his art, the subtle sweetness that he drew from the strength of his work.  The master, certainly, of Lorenzo di Credi and Leonardo, and finally of Perugino also, he was a painter as well as a sculptor; and though his greatest work was achieved in marble and bronze, one cannot lightly pass by the Annunciation of the Uffizi, or the Baptism of the Accademia.  Neglected for so long, he is at last recognised as one of the greatest of all Italian masters of the Renaissance.

The pupil of a goldsmith practising the craft of a founder, he cast the sacristy gates of the Duomo for Luca della Robbia.  In sculpture he appears to have studied under Donatello, though his work shows little of his influence; and working, as we may suppose, with his master in S. Lorenzo, he made the bronze plaque for the tomb of Cosimo there before the choir, and the monument of Piero and Giovanni de’ Medici beside the door of the sacristy.  It was again for Lorenzo de’ Medici that he made the exquisite Child and Dolphin now in the court of Palazzo Vecchio, and the statue of the young David now in Bargello.  The subtle grace and delight of this last seem not uncertainly to suggest the strange and lovely work of Leonardo da Vinci.  There for the first time you may discern the smile that is like a ray of sunshine in Leonardo’s shadowy pictures.  More perfect in craftsmanship and in the knowledge of anatomy than Donatello, Verrocchio here, where he seems almost to have been inspired by the David of his master, surpasses him in energy and beauty, and while Donatello’s figure is involved with the head of Goliath, so that the feet are lost in the massive and almost shapeless bronze, Verrocchio’s David stands clear of the grim and monstrous thing at his feet.  Simpler, too, and less uncertain is the whole pose of the figure, who is in no doubt of himself, and in his heart he has already “slain his thousands.”

In the portrait of Monna Vanna degli Albizi, the Lady with the Nosegay, Verrocchio is the author of the most beautiful bust of the Renaissance.  She fills the room with sunshine, and all day long she seems to whisper some beloved name.  A smile seems ever about to pass over her face under her clustering hair, and she has folded her beautiful hands on her bosom, as though she were afraid of their beauty and would live ever in their shadow.

[Illustration:  THE LADY WITH THE NOSEGAY (VANNA TORNABUONI?)

In the Bargello.  Andrea Verrocchio

Alinari]