well finished, which will make him wish to have yours chased without further delay.”  The three heads had then been cast; Diomede was polishing his up with the file; Daniele had not yet begun to do this for Lionardo’s.  We hear nothing more until the death of Daniele da Volterra.  After this event occurred, Lionardo Buonarroti received a letter from Jacopo del Duca, a Sicilian bronze-caster of high merit, who had enjoyed Michelangelo’s confidence and friendship.  He was at present employed upon the metal-work for Buonarroti’s monument in the Church of the SS.  Apostoli in Rome, and on the 18th of April he sent important information respecting the two heads left by Daniele.  “Messer Danielo had cast them, but they are in such a state as to require working over afresh with chisels and files.  I am not sure, then, whether they will suit your purpose; but that is your affair.  I, for my part, should have liked you to have the portrait from the hand of the lamented master himself, and not from any other.  Your lordship must decide:  appeal to some one who can inform you better than I do.  I know that I am speaking from the love I bear you; and perhaps, if Danielo had been alive, he would have had them brought to proper finish.  As for those men of his, I do not know what they will do.”  On the same day, a certain Michele Alberti wrote as follows:  “Messer Jacopo, your gossip, has told me that your lordship wished to know in what condition are the heads of the late lamented Michelangelo.  I inform you that they are cast, and will be chased within the space of a month, or rather more.  So your lordship will be able to have them; and you may rest assured that you will be well and quickly served.”  Alberti, we may conjecture, was one of Daniele’s men alluded to by Jacopo del Duca.  It is probable that just at this time they were making several replicas from their deceased master’s model, in order to dispose of them at an advantage while Michelangelo’s memory was still fresh.  Lionardo grew more and more impatient.  He appealed again to Diomede Leoni, who replied from San Quirico upon the 4th of June:  “The two heads were in existence when I left Rome, but not finished up.  I imagine you have given orders to have them delivered over to yourself.  As for the work of chasing them, if you can wait till my return, we might intrust them to a man who succeeded very well with my own copy.”  Three years later, on September 17, 1569, Diomede wrote once again about his copy of Da Volterra’s model:  “I enjoy the continual contemplation of his effigy in bronze, which is now perfectly finished and set up in my garden, where you will see it, if good fortune favours me with a visit from you.”

The net result of this correspondence seems to be that certainly three bronze heads, and probably more, remained unfinished in Daniele da Volterra’s workshop after his death, and that these were gradually cleaned and polished by different craftsmen, according to the pleasure of their purchasers.  The strong resemblance of the eight bronze heads at present known to us, in combination with their different states of surface-finish, correspond entirely to this conclusion.  Mr. Fortnum, in his classification, describes four as being not chased, one as “rudely and broadly chased,” three as “more or less chased.”