The only painting agreed to be by the man who taught Leonardo da Vinci has emerged from one of the most intricate pieces of restoration by the National Gallery.
Andrea del Verrocchio has long been regarded as one of the finest sculptors of the Renaissance. Experts on the period rate his few surviving drawings equally highly. Until now there was confusion about his ability and legacy as a painter — some art historians argued that he could not really paint at all — and disputes over authorship of the few paintings claimed for him. This left a 500-year-old question hanging over the extent to which he developed the skills of his brilliant crop of apprentices, who included the young Leonardo, Lorenzo di Credi, Pietro Perugino and probably Sandro Botticelli.
The Virgin and Child with Two Angels has been in the National Gallery’s collection since 1857, when it was bought as by Domenico Ghirlandaio. Latterly it was credited to the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio. The 18-month cleaning and restoration process, which included an entire summer painstakingly removing a previous restorer’s oil paints with a scalpel, revealed a work vastly more sophisticated than had been supposed.
With the agreement of scholars around the world, the National Gallery has now attributed the painting to Verrocchio, with assistance from di Credi, who specialists believe painted the infant Christ and the smaller of the angels. It is thought to have been painted in about 1475.
Nicholas Penny, the director of the gallery, said: “We would not have advanced this attribution unless there was a consensus amongst the people [from outside the gallery] who had seen it.” The attribution had been made possible by information presented by the gallery’s scientific department and by the quality of the restoration work, but ultimately “rests on connoisseurship”.
From an aesthetic and art historical point of view, the Verrocchio is priceless, but if it were to come to auction today there is every possibility that it could threaten the £49.5 million record for an Old Master painting fetched by Rubens’s The Massacre of the Innocents in 2002.
Scant supply of masterpieces is the only restraint on the small clique of billionaire collectors who compete for world-class trophy artworks, such as the Giacometti statue that, at £65 million, broke the world record at auction on Wednesday, or the Raphael drawing that sold for £29 million in December. A Verrocchio of this quality falls into that category.
Like his most famous pupil, Verrocchio (about 1435-1488) was a polymath: musician, engineer and goldsmith as well as sculptor, painter and draughtsman. He was a giant figure in his day but suffered terminal damage to his reputation from the gossipy 16th-century historian Giorgio Vasari, who described his art as “hard and crude, since it was the product of unremitting study rather than of any natural gift or facility”. By the time that Luke Syson, the National Gallery’s curator of Italian paintings 1460-1500, arrived in his post in 2002, The Virgin and Child was in a sorry state after some “very, very disfiguring retouchings”. These had particularly damaged her face, which looked “like she’d been in a knife fight in Peckham”.
Syson secured the support of the gallery’s trustees in April 2008 and one of the institution’s senior restorers set to work. Jill Dunkerton’s first task was to peel back the layers of previous restorations, stepping back farther into the past each time to piece together who did what to the picture and correct their eccentricities.
She encountered the work of Sebastian Isepp, an Austrian Jew who modernised restoration practices in the 1930s, and Giuseppe Molteni, a brilliant 19th-century Milanese prone to painting out details he disapproved of and adding gold halos and decorative brooches. Then she had a nasty surprise: an early 18th-century restorer had reworked the painting substantially in oils, which can be removed only with a scalpel.
It took Ms Dunkerton a whole summer slowly to expose the original egg tempera painting underneath. She used more than 100 blades, knowing that a false stroke at any time could prove irreparable.
“You would think you would go mad but actually it was very, very satisfying because of the quality of what emerged,” she said. Beneath the oils she discovered a level of painterly virtuosity that had not previously been associated with Verrocchio.
Before the gallery’s restoration work there was only one painting that was widely attributed to Verrocchio: The Baptism of Christ in the Uffizi, Florence. Even in this famous work, Verrocchio seems to have used an assistant for much of the original painting and the picture was later substantially reworked and finished by Leonardo.
In The Virgin and Child it was the confidence of the underdrawing, revealed by infra-red technology, allied to the sculptural sophistication of some of the modelling of the Virgin and the left-hand angel that helped to make the case for Verrocchio.
The restoration of The Virgin and Child has made it possible to reassess other disputed paintings possibly by Verrocchio. Both The Ruskin Madonna at the National Gallery of Scotland, painted about 1470, and a more awkward painting in the National Gallery’s own collection, from 1467-69, also called The Virgin and Child with Two Angels, have now been tentatively attributed to him, making 2009-10 the artist’s most prolific season for five centuries.
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