than to Alfonso, or Giovanni Tornabuoni.  Mantegna’s portrait of Gonzaga, though made later, shows a rather different type, less displeasing than the bronze.  In the bust we have what is probably the portrait of a coarse and clumsy person; he is petulant in the mouth, weak in the chin, gross in the thick and heavy jaw.  The bronze is extremely rough, and shows no signs of the nervous and individual touches which we find in Donatello’s terra-cotta.  Both the busts are unfinished; in the absence of chasing and hammering they are covered with bubbles and splotches of metal.  They have, therefore, not passed through the hands of assistants, except so far as the actual casting of the bronze was concerned.  During the process of casting the refinements of a clay model would often be impaired, but this shows no sign of having been made from an original of merit.  The man is ugly, it is true; but the broad expanse of his lifeless cheek and the bulbous forehead would in real life have been explained and justified by bone and muscle, which the sculptor would have rendered in his clay study.  The ugliness of the man, however, is unrelated to the qualities of the bust.  Nobody could make the likeness of an ugly man better than Donatello; and since the faults of this portrait lie more in the modelling than in the sitter, one is driven to conclude that the bust must be entirely the work of an assistant, or else a failure of the master.

[Footnote 164:  It used to be over one of the doors, preserved in una custodia which Richa thought ought to have been made of crystal, so precious was the bust.—­“Ch.  Fiorentine,” 1758, v. 39.]

[Footnote 165:  Victoria and Albert Museum, No. 7585, 1861.]

An effective counterpart to this bust exists in Berlin.  It is also a life-sized bronze of an older man, and in many ways the likeness to the Gonzaga bust is notable.  But wherever Gonzaga’s features lack distinction this portrait shows fine qualities and good breeding.  Nothing could better illustrate how minute are the plastic details which will revolutionise a countenance; how easily noble and handsome features can degenerate into what is sordid and vulgar.  In this bust the chin, though receding, is far from weak; the lips are full but not sensual; the nose has the faint aquiline curve of distinction.  There is benevolence in the eyes, meditation in the brow, dignity and reserve throughout the physiognomy:  it is the portrait of a man who may be great, but who must be good.  When a bronze abozzo has to be finished the detail is added by hammering the metal, or incising it with gravers.  Thus the bronze has to be reduced, it being seldom possible to enlarge it at any point.  But the Gonzaga bust would require to be enlarged in several places to make it a lifelike head.  In the case of the portrait just described, the metal was cast from a rough sketch which, in the first place, had the qualities of a living and consistent head,