[Footnote 155:  In Grosvenor House.  Bronze; generally known as “The Laughing Boy.”]

[Footnote 156:  Its proportion is impaired by the basal drapery, which was grafted to the statue at a later date.  This bust belonged to Sabba da Castiglione, who was very proud of it.  He was born within twenty years of Donatello’s death.]

[Footnote 157:  No. 383.  Marble.  Goupil Bequest.]

[Footnote 158:  Stucco, No. 38A. Cf. also one belonging to Herr Richard von Kaufmann, Berlin.]

[Footnote 159:  No. 1274, St. John, Florentine School, a painting.]

* * * * *

[Illustration:  Alinari

NICCOLO DA UZZANO

BARGELLO, FLORENCE]

[Sidenote:  Niccolo da Uzzano and Polychromacy.]

The bust of Niccolo da Uzzano has gained its widespread popularity from its least genuine feature—­namely, the paint with which it is disfigured.  The daubs of colour give it a fictitious importance, an actual realism which invests it with the illusion of living flesh and blood.  This is all the more unfortunate, as the bust is a remarkable work, and does not gain by being made into a “speaking likeness.”  Its merits can best be appreciated in a cast, where the form is reproduced without the dubious embellishments of later times.  Niccolo was a high-minded patrician, an implacable opponent of the Medici, and a warm friend of higher education:  it is also of interest that he should have been an executor of the will of John XXIII.  He was born in 1359, and died in 1432.  The bust is made of terra-cotta, and shows a man of sixty-five or so, and would therefore be coeval with the later Campanile prophets (but nothing beyond old tradition can be accepted as authority for the nomenclature).  The modelling of the head is quite masterly.  Niccolo is looking rather to the left; his keen and hawklike countenance, and his piercing eyes, deep set and quivering within pendulous eyelids, give a sense of invincible logic and penetration.  The laconic, matter-of-fact mouth, and the resolute jaw add strength and courage to the physiognomy:  the nose and its disdainful nostrils are those of the haughty optimate.  The head is, however, less fine than the face:  a skull of rather common proportions, and a sloping though broad forehead are its marked features.  Donatello has given him an ugly ear; Niccolo’s ear was, therefore, ugly, and the throat is swollen.  The shoulders are covered with a thick piece of drapery, leaving the throat and upper part of the breast bare.  Such is the impression conveyed by Niccolo in the cast.  In the Bargello the colouring modifies what the form itself was meant to suggest.  The smallest error of a paint-brush, the slightest deepening of a pigment, are quite sufficient to make radical alterations in the sentiment of a statue.  When applied to plastic art, colour is potent enough to change the