As you see, he is a golden boy, gilded silver, not plain silver, as he appears in the nearly full size photos of him and the grizzled old soldier with his back to us that the current Smithsonian Magazine shows us, nearly full size (he is 8" high). So either the gilding was added later and has now been removed in the recent "restoration," or some other explanation is in order?

If he was originally gilded, wheher by Leonardo or Verrocchio and his studio where Leonardo was still apprenticed to him at age 21, then I assume the other six soldiers are or were also gilded.

I was looking, in vain, for a photo of this silver panel on the altar in the Baptistery in Florence that this figure came from, but found none with the panel still on it. The reason must be that it was long since removed from there to the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo (Museum of the Works of the Duomo). But though I was in both the Baptistery and the Duomo Museum during the Christmas holidays this winter I didn't see it in either place, so I assume the Museum had already lent it out to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta for the show curated by Professor Gary Radke of Syracuse (who has argued that this figure and a growly old soldier are by Leonardo rather than Verrocchio), where it be on view from October 6 until February 21, and then will be on view at the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles from March 23 to June 30.