One story says that when Verrocchio saw Leonardo's addition to the painting, he was so amazed by his student's skill, that he said he would never paint again.
VOA: special.2010.09.15
Painting icons is a skill that many of the monks and nuns continue to practice and you will probably see them perfecting their latest piece of art.
Skill at painting and drawing were his measure of artistic success, and he found it in the work of Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff, Philip Pearlstein, Susan Rothenberg, Elizabeth Murray, Philip Guston, R.
It's worth contemplating that the most powerful and substantive works are not those in which Zoffany awes us with his considerable skill at painting frothy fabrics and other accoutrements of the era's formal portraiture, but rather the substantive studies of interesting sitters.