The angel may still be seen in Florence, a space of sunlight in the
cold, laboured old picture; but the legend is true only in sentiment,
for painting had always been the art by which Verrocchio set least
store. And as in a sense he anticipates Leonardo, so to the last
Leonardo recalls the studio of Verrocchio, in the love of beautiful
toys, such as the vessel of water for a mirror, and lovely needle-work
about the implicated hands in the Modesty and Vanity, and of reliefs
like those cameos which in the Virgin of the Balances hang all round the
girdle of Saint Michael, and of bright variegated stones, such as the
agates in the Saint Anne, and in a hieratic preciseness and grace, as of
a sanctuary swept and garnished. Amid all the cunning and intricacy of
his Lombard manner this never left him. Much of it there must have been
in that lost picture of Paradise, which he prepared as a cartoon for
tapestry, to be woven in the looms of Flanders. It was the perfection of
the older Florentine style of miniature-painting, with patient putting
of each leaf upon the trees and each flower in the grass, where the
first man and woman were standing.
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