There's a story everyone tells about him: a master saw his student's angel, dropped his brush, and never painted again. It's a great story. It's also probably not true.
Andrea del Verrocchio ran the busiest workshop in Florence, mixing bronze, marble, paint, and goldwork under one roof, and used it to train not one genius but several. Leonardo da Vinci learned there. So did Domenico Ghirlandaio, who later taught Michelangelo. So did Pietro Perugino, who later taught Raphael. A single workshop, on a single street, quietly became the root of an entire family tree of Renaissance masters, most of whom went on to overshadow the man who trained them.
Verrocchio also helped engineer the golden sphere still visible atop Brunelleschi's dome, and he died before finishing what should have been his masterpiece, an equestrian monument in Venice, leaving Florence to settle by competition who would complete it.
This is the story of the most influential teacher the Renaissance produced, and the four hundred year old rumor that talked him out of his own legacy.
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Florence: The City That Changed the World is a series about the city that invented the Renaissance, financed Europe, and left a legacy still present in everything you see, think, and use every day.
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