The Master’s Master

Andrea del Verrocchio’s statues may lack the silken sheen of Benvenuto Cellini’s metalwork and the epic grandeur of Michelangelo’s marbles, the works that shaped artistic taste in Vasari’s time. But their achievements depended absolutely on the legacy of this man of many talents: his skill as a teacher, his pioneering experiments with casting metals, and his efforts to portray the human figure in space, not only in sculpture, but also in painting, and above all in the activity that Vasari himself considered the fundamental underpinning to every kind of art: disegno, a word that meant both drawing and design.