Description
The Baptism of Christ – the painting where the pupil overtook the master
The Baptism of Christ was made in Andrea del Verrocchio’s workshop, where the young Leonardo da Vinci trained. That is exactly why it is one of the rare paintings in which you can see with the naked eye where excellent Renaissance routine ends and something entirely new begins. Our hand-painted reproduction on canvas brings this historic scene into your home, painted in oil on canvas.
Two hands on one panel
The painting was made between 1472 and 1475, measures 177 × 151 cm, and is held in the Uffizi in Florence. Verrocchio painted Christ, John the Baptist and most of the composition in tempera. Leonardo contributed the angel on the left and, in all likelihood, much of the background landscape – and that part is painted in oil, the technique just then brought to Florence by Dutch and Flemish painters. The difference is not a historical footnote: oil allows soft transitions tempera cannot manage, and that is precisely why the angel looks as though it were made of a different substance from everything around it.
The angel looking elsewhere
Leonardo’s angel kneels on the left, his back to the viewer, looking up towards the baptism. His face is modelled with a softness found nowhere else in the picture; the hair curls in strands Leonardo would go on painting all his life. Move your eye from the angel to the figure beside him and the difference is immediate – and that is the fascination of this work. It is not a contest, but the moment when someone appears inside a settled workshop practice who is going to change its rules.
Vasari’s story of the master who put down his brush
A century later Giorgio Vasari wrote that Verrocchio was so shaken by Leonardo’s angel that he never painted again. It is a fine story and gets repeated readily, but it remains Vasari’s anecdote: Vasari did not know Leonardo personally, and the truth of these accounts cannot be checked. It is true, however, that Verrocchio’s activity as a painter does dry up around this time – which gives the story just enough footing that it can be neither confirmed nor entirely dismissed. We report it as tradition, not as fact.
A hand-painted reproduction for your home
Every reproduction of The Baptism of Christ is entirely hand-painted in oil on canvas – not a print, but a real painting created for you by an experienced artist. It is available in eight sizes, stretched on a wooden frame on request and in a frame from our 3D range. Given the scale of the original and the density of the composition, the work is at its best in a larger format, where the figures and the landscape can breathe. Among our canvas wall art you will also find Leonardo’s early Florentine works: The Annunciation, The Adoration of the Magi and The Madonna of the Carnation.
- Subject: The Baptism of Christ, Andrea del Verrocchio and Leonardo da Vinci, 1472–1475
- Technique: hand-painted oil painting on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 8 dimensions, stretched on a wooden frame on request
- Fact: the angel on the left is Leonardo’s – painted in oil, while the rest of the picture is in tempera
