Florentine School (15th Century). _See also_ (p. xix) The authorship of this picture and of No. 781, which must be by the same hand, is one of the unsolved problems of art criticism. It has at different times been ascribed to Domenico Ghirlandajo, to Antonio Pollajuolo, to the school of Piero Pollajuolo, to Verrocchio, and to an unknown master in the school of the last-mentioned painter. Sir F. Burton said, "If not by Verrocchio, it must be the work of one of his most distinguished pupils." Sir Edward Poynter says, "This picture has all the characteristics of Andrea del Verrocchio's best work, and is probably by that painter; but the small number of works that can with certainty be ascribed to him renders the attribution uncertain." Andrea del Verrocchio (1435-1488) was the sculptor of the celebrated equestrian statue of Bartolommeo Colleoni at Venice, than which, says Ruskin, "I do not believe that there is a more glorious work of sculpture existing in the world" (_Stones of Venice_, vol. iii. ch. I, § 22). As a painter Verrocchio was for a time the master of Leonardo da Vinci, who painted the figure of an angel in Verrocchio's "Baptism of Christ" (in the Florentine Academy). "This figure," says Vasari (ii. 255), "was so much superior to the other parts of the picture that, perceiving this, Verrocchio resolved never again to take pencil in hand." Whether this be so or not, Verrocchio left an enduring mark on the art of his time. "He delighted to paint the _putto_--the infant boy who is just beginning to rejoice in the use of his limbs--and with such a charm did he invest his creations of this kind, whether in sculpture or in painting, that," says Dr. Meyer, "it is not too much to say that he was the creator of that child-type which is so universal in the Italian art of the _Cinque-cento_." "Verrocchio," says E. Müntz, "is the plastic artist, deeply enamoured of form, delighting in hollowing it out, in fining it down; he has none of the literary temperament of a Donatello, a Mantegna, masters who in order to give expression to the passions that stir them, to realise their ideal, need a vast theatre, numerous actors, dramatic subjects. There is no _mise-en-scène_, no searching after recondite ideas, with Verrocchio. Most suggestive in spirit, he sowed more than he reaped, and produced more pupils than masterpieces. All there is of feminine, one might almost say effeminate, in Leonardo's art, the delicacy, the _morbidezza_, the suavity, appear, though often merely in embryo, in the work of Verrocchio" (_Leonardo da Vinci_, i. 23, 25). The one undoubted picture by Verrocchio is "The Baptism" above referred to. In the St. George's Museum at Sheffield there is a "Madonna Adoring"