prophets.  The Zuccone must belong to the series of prophets; it is fruitless to speculate which.  Cherichini may have inspired the portrait.  Its ugliness is insuperable.  It is not the vulgar ugliness of a caricature, nor is it the audacious embodiment of some hideous misshapen creature such as we find in Velasquez, in the Gobbo of Verona, or in the gargoyles of Notre Dame.  There is no deformity about it, probably very little exaggeration.  It is sheer uncompromising ugliness; rendered by the cavernous mouth, the blear eyes, the flaccid complexion, the unrelieved cranium—­all carried to a logical conclusion in the sloping shoulders and the simian arms.  But the Zuccone is not “revenged of nature”:  there is nothing to “induce contempt.”  On the other hand, indeed, there is a tinge of sadness and compassion, objective and subjective, which gives it a charm, even a fascination. Tanto e bella, says Bocchi, tanto e vera, tanto e naturale, that one gazes upon it in astonishment, wondering in truth why the statue does not speak![23] Bocchi’s criticism cannot be improved.  The problem has been obfuscated by the modern jargon of art.  Donatello has been charged with orgies of realism and so forth.  There may be realism, but the term must be used with discretion:  nowadays it generally connotes the ugly treatment of an ugly theme, and is applied less as a technical description than as a term of abuse.  Donatello was certainly no realist in the sense that an ideal was excluded, nor could he have been led by realism into servile imitation or the multiplication of realities.  After a certain point the true ceases to be true, as nobody knew better than Barye, the greatest of the “realists.”  The Zuccone can be more fittingly described in Bocchi’s words.  It is the creation of a verist, of a naturalist, founded on a clear and intimate perception of nature.  Donatello was pledged to no system, and his only canon, if such existed, was the canon of observation matured by technical ability.  We have no reason to suppose that Donatello claimed to be a deep thinker.  He did not spend his time, like Michael Angelo, in devising theories to explain the realms of art.  He was without analytical pedantry, and, like his character, his work was naive and direct.  Nor was he absorbed by appreciation of “beauty,” abstract or concrete.  If he saw a man with a humped back or a short leg he would have been prepared to make his portrait, assuming that the entity was not in conflict with the subject in hand.  Hence the Zuccone.  Its mesmeric ugliness is the effect of Donatello’s gothic creed, and it well shows how Donatello, who from his earliest period was opposed to the conventions of the Pisan school, took the lead among those who founded their art upon the observation of nature.  A later critic, shrewd and now much neglected, said that Titian “contented himself with pure necessity, which is the simple imitation of nature."[24] One could not say quite so much of