Review by Choice Review
Covi packs an entire career of thinking, researching, and writing about Verrocchio into one volume. Verrocchio, the workhorse of late-15th-century Florence, well deserves a book of this seriousness and impeccable standard of production. Formed under the influence of Desiderio da Settignano and Antonio Rossellino, Verrocchio developed a robust, vigorous style, defined by the author as anticipating the Baroque. The shop played an extraordinary role, training scores of painters and sculptors, and in the person of Leonardo, setting forth the terms of a new era of art production. The strength of the volume lies in its scrupulous weighing of all works against the documentary record. The full range of production--sculpture, paintings, and drawings--is covered, but the focus is front and center on sculpture. Verrocchio's two most demanding sculptural commissions--the equestrian monument of Bartolomeo Colleoni for Venice and the Doubting Thomas group for Or San Michele, Florence--are discussed in stunning detail that makes all previous treatments obsolete. A grand achievement that harks back to a prior age of scholarship. ^BSumming Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. D. Pincus National Gallery of Art
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
