Wandering Boy

The marble baby dimpling among the dried-up plants on the Manhattan art dealer's window sill was badly in need of a bath. But to Dr. Walter Heil, director of San Francisco's De Young Memorial Museum, his happy face and grimy little body had a familiar look. Andrea del Verrocchio,* Renaissance goldsmith, painter and sculptor, had carved some other youngsters very like him.

After long reflection, Director Heil bought the boy (for a price he regards as his secret) and took him home for a good soap & water scrubbing. By this winter he had reconstructed the sculpture's travels. In the 18303, it was purchased for the royal family of Wuerttemberg and moved from Florence to a palace near Stuttgart; there it remained till after World War I, when a Berlin dealer bought it, later brought it to the U.S., where it wound up in the Manhattan window.

Heil had little trouble convincing most fellow connoisseurs that it was a genuine Verrocchio, and that it belonged in the all-too-short catalogue of the 15th Century master's works. He proudly put the sculpture on display in his San Francisco museum.

Last week Heil had another feather in his discoverer's cap. Florence, which in recent months has been sending its art treasures to the U.S. for display (TIME, Feb. 7), wanted to borrow the wandering Florentine boy for an exhibition in the Museum of the Bargello this spring.

* Florentine Verrocchio is best known for his enormous and powerful equestrian statue of the hawk-faced Renaissance condottiere, Bartolommeo Colleoni, in Venice, and his elegant bronze figure of David astride Goliath's head; also for the fact that he was Leonardo da Vinci's first teacher and was said to have turned from painting to sculpture when his precocious pupil surpassed him.

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