WASHINGTON — Probably, on a long car ride or at a lagging dinner party, you have been asked that trivial query: If you could have been born at any time and place, where and when would you choose? If you’re an artist, then at least as a practical matter you ought to consider reincarnating in Florence in the late 15th century.

You’d have hit the all-time jackpot of patronage and partnerships: Tuscany’s economic powerhouse was becoming a cultural capital, and the newly powerful Medicis were ready to bankroll painters, architects, goldsmiths and engineers. You could spend your whole career painting saints, carving statesmen and designing palaces, perhaps splitting the work with your colleagues: Sandro Botticelli, Pietro Perugino, Domenico Ghirlandaio and a certain left-handed upstart from the town of Vinci.

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.

His contemporary fame lags well behind his students’, though, and tour groups bee-lining through Florence to the Uffizi and the Palazzo Vecchio walk right by Verrocchio’s statues and paintings. Might that start to change with “Verrocchio: Sculptor and Painter of Renaissance Florence,” a fantastic exhibition at the National Gallery of Art here? It’s the first solo show ever in the United States for this hinge figure between Donatello and the High Renaissance, and its 50 works — especially its sculptures of marble, bronze and terra cotta — ought to wake us up to the trailblazer right under our noses.