Volume 45, Number 3 · February 19, 1998
Verrocchio: The New Cicerone
By James Fenton
The Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio
by Andrew Butterfield
Yale University Press, 262 pp., $65.00
A few months ago, a terra-cotta bust of a woman passed through the London auction rooms, leaving a little puzzlement and worry in its wake. Once, in its glory days, as a work of Andrea del Verrocchio, it had graced the collection of J. Pierpont Morgan. That interesting scholar W.R. Valentiner, who earlier this century was lured from Berlin to the Metropolitan Museum in New York (his career forms a link between Bode's Berlin and the Getty Museum in Malibu), compared the profile of the bust with a drawing by Leonardo in Windsor Castle. He thought that the master (Verrocchio) and his most famous pupil (Leonardo) might have used the same model.[1] But other voices were raised to denounce the work as a fake. Or, if not a fake, as a portrait of a nineteenth-century sitter in Renaissance costume. This low opinion prevailed over Valentiner's, and the bust was disgraced, deaccessioned, without chance of reprieve.
Review, 6852 words
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