Verrocchio's David is described in the sources as a sturdy, wiry young apprentice in a leather doublet, standing with a jaunty pride, Goliath's head lying at his feet exactly as in Donatello's earlier bronze^[1]. The comparison between the two statues, made from the moment Verrocchio's version was finished, is part of the point: both show the same biblical moment, in the same medium, destined for the same city, yet the young men could not be more different. Verrocchio gives his David the easy balance and lithe, still-adolescent musculature of a real boy rather than an idealised youth, with veins showing through the skin. One source reads this as Verrocchio working closely from the biblical text itself, understanding the psychology of a brash, confident young man who has just done something extraordinary, rather than reaching for a classical ideal^[1].

Vasari's life of Verrocchio opens by listing everything he tried: goldsmith, painter, sculptor, wood carver, student of perspective, even musician^[2]. Vasari is blunt that Verrocchio's manner in sculpture and painting was 'somewhat hard and crude', achieved by relentless study rather than natural facility, and argues that this diligence is exactly what places him among the excellent masters of his art rather than the merely gifted^[2]. Verrocchio began as a goldsmith, making decorative buttons for copes still held in Florence's Santa Maria del Fiore, before the Merchants' Guild commissioned him to make silver scenes for the altar of San Giovanni, the work that first brought him wide praise^[2]. That goldsmith's training in fine metalwork underlies the close, careful surface of the bronze David.

According to an early account, Leonardo's father Ser Piero brought some of his son's drawings to his friend Verrocchio and asked for an honest opinion; Verrocchio was impressed enough to take the boy on as a pupil, probably around the age of fifteen^[3]. Verrocchio's workshop trained painters and sculptors side by side, and his drawings of female heads were later imitated by Leonardo, who transformed them into some of his own most admired faces^[4]. One writer credits Leonardo's presence in the workshop with pushing Verrocchio's own later sculpture toward greater refinement, arguing that the pupil helped mature the master as much as the reverse^[3]. Verrocchio's David predates Leonardo's arrival in the workshop, but it belongs to the same working culture that shaped him: a bottega where painting, sculpture and goldsmith's technique were taught as one connected craft, not separate trades.