A landmark exhibition investigates Leonardo da Vinci's early years as an artist

On view at the Yale University Art Gallery from June 29 through October 7, Leonardo: Discoveries from Verrocchio’s Studio investigates a virtually unknown period in the career of perhaps the most famous artist of the Italian Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519). The exhibition focuses on the claim of Leonardo’s first biographers that as a boy he was apprenticed to the sculptor, painter, and goldsmith Andrea del Verrocchio (ca. 1435–1488). Verrocchio is a mysterious personality. While many of his sculptures in bronze and marble are today admired as iconic masterpieces of 15th-century Florentine art, scholars have never agreed on a list of surviving paintings that might be by him, or even whether any of them are by one artist alone. Consequently, previous attempts to determine what Leonardo might have learned from Verrocchio have rarely led to serious proposals to identify the earliest works of that revo