His father, Michele di Francesco Cioni, initially worked as a tile and brick maker, then later as a tax collector.

His main works are dated in his last twenty years and his advancement owed much to the patronage of Lorenzo de' Medici and his son Piero.

[5] Giovanni Santi records that Botticelli, Luca Signorelli, and a young Filippino Lippi also visited or worked in Verrocchio's studio.

[9] A painting of the Madonna with seated child in tempera on panel (now in the Berlin State Museums, Gemäldegalerie) is considered an early work of 1468–1470.

In this work Verrocchio was assisted by Leonardo da Vinci, then a youth and a member of his workshop, who painted the angel on the left and the part of the background above.

According to Giorgio Vasari, Andrea resolved never to touch the brush again because Leonardo, his pupil, had far surpassed him, but later critics consider this story apocryphal.

[14] Also in 1468 he contracted to make a golden ball (palla) to be placed on top of the lantern of Brunelleschi's cupola on the Duomo in Florence.

[22] The relief for the funerary monument of Francesca Tornabuoni for Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome is also now in the Bargello at Florence.

He had asked that his pupil Lorenzo di Credi, who was then in charge of his workshop in Florence, should be entrusted with the finishing of the statue, but after the considerable delay the Venetian state commissioned Alessandro Leopardi to do this.

The statue was eventually erected on a pedestal made by Leopardi in the Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Venice, where it stands today.

[23] Leopardi cast the bronze very successfully and the statue is universally admired, but Pope-Hennessy suggests that, if Verrocchio had been able to do this himself, he would have finished the head and other parts more smoothly and made it even better than it is.

[24] Although it was not placed where Colleoni had intended, Passavent emphasised how fine it looks in its actual position, writing that "the magnificent sense of movement in this figure is shown to superb advantage in its present setting"[25] and that, as sculpture, "it far surpasses anything the century had yet aspired to or thought possible".

Verrocchio is unlikely to have ever seen Colleoni and the statue is not a portrait of the man but of the idea of a strong and ruthless military commander "bursting with titanic power and energy".

[27] This is in contrast to Donatello's statue at Padua of the condottiere known as Gattamelata with its "air of calm command" and all Verrocchio's effort "has been devoted to the rendering of movement and of a sense of strain and energy".