An installation view of “Verrocchio: Sculptor and Painter of Renaissance Florence” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Center, the artist’s bronze “David With the Head of Goliath” (1465).

Leonardo and those other artists all worked in the same studio in Medici Florence, the studio of Andrea del Verrocchio (circa 1435-1488). Like most of the top artists during the Renaissance’s greatest building boom, Verrocchio was a man of all trades, chiseling marble and casting bronze, painting altarpieces and designing monuments, machinery, theatrical costumes. For the munificent Medicis, he was the artist on call, even unto death: Verrocchio designed their lavish tombs for the family church. And in every innovation — more flowing drapery, more dynamic movement, more lifelike faces and hands — Verrocchio set the bar for virtuosity that his students tried to ape and exceed.