Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 03.djvu/810

* BUST. 722 BUST. heads back to back. It was not until Alexander's time that busts were commonly used fur ))ur- poses of portraiture in Greece^ for until then sculpture had concerned itself less with realistic reproduction than with types. After that time tiie bust became perliaps the favorite form of portraiture. The two most important known series are portraits of Alexander — with the liead drawn down on one side and the eyes raised — and of his successors the Ptolemies of Egypt and the Seleucids of Syria, as well as the minor kings of the Hellenic* East, such as the Attalids. An- other large class of Hellenistic busts are those of men of letters — poets, philosophers, orators — such as Plato, Zeno the Stoic, Epicurus, and other philosophers, Isoerates, and Demosthenes. To these authentic portraits should he added ideal heads of earlier personages, such as Homer, Peric-les,. axagoras, and other early philoso- lihers. of whom there were certainly no contem- porary likenesses. At this time bronze was even more popular than marble as a material for busts. Various sizes were in vogue; some were more than life-size, for use in public places, others were diminutive, for chamber decoration. Founders of museums and libraries and wealthy amateurs sought to procure sets of such busts. The portraitists of this period showed great ability in expressing the dominant traits of char- acter' without descending to realism. In this respect they differed from those other great portraitists of the ancient world, the Etruscans and Romans. The custom of these two peoples of preserving and carrying in procession the imagines, wax portraits of ancestors who had distinguished themselves, contributed to the popularity of portrait busts. The superb bronze Etruscan' bust of the elder Brutus in the C'npitoline probably antedates any of the Greek portraits, and its form of draped shoulders in place of the herm-shape was afterwards almost universally adopted. The Forums and other public places were encumbered under the Re- ])ublic with marble and bronze portrait figures. Still, the busts preserved to us seem all to be- long to the Imperial period, or the generation preceding it: those that represent Republican worthies being a])parenlly not contemporary. Even the heads of the elder Scipio Africanus are of doubtful authenticity. The custom of col- lections of lures and pe)i(ites popularized the use of busts, as did the founding of libraries, mu- seums, and private collections. Villas, hoiises.and public l)uildings were filled with busts. There is an uniiiterrujited chronological series from Au- gustus to .Julian the .postate. The most nnmer- ois series is that of the Emperors and members of the Imperial family. The largest collection of these is at present in the Capitoline Museum; the next in the Vatican Museum in Rome. The British Museum and Louvre have some good examples. It is by means of a comparison with coins and medals that most of these can be iden- tified with certainty, for the inscriptions on busts are not always rcliiible. The series of jiortrait busts of philosophers and poets was far less popvilar than before the Empire. Pri- vate collectors of busts were not unknown, as, for instance, those of M. Terentius Varro and Pomponius Atticus. The letters of Cicero and Pliny show how they were made. One sich col- lection has fortunately been unearthed in the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum, belonging to a philosopher of the time of Cicero. Tliis gi-oup, now in the Naples iluseum, and mainly of bronzes, is the finest of its kind preserved from antiquity. The collector's taste was catholic. His busts begin with c.500 B.C., and the earliest are ideal heads of athletes: each century is represented x ith exquisite works; the ages of Polycletus. of Praxiteles, of Lysippus. The masterpieces are perhaps some large heads of royal personages of the .lexandrian .ge, su])- jiosed to represent some of the Ptolemies, the so-called 'Plato,' "Berenice,' and 'Seneca.' In the set of miniature busts, for the decoration of library or larariuin, are a number of great philosophers and orators, some inscribed with their names. The great period of portraiture closes with Septimius Severus and Caracalla, at the liegin- ning of the Third Century a.d., and the decadence is then continuous to the time of .Justinian in the Sixth Century, when busts ceased to be executed. It remained apparently a lost art until the Thirteenth Century. Then, curiously enough, a proto-Renaissance in Southern Italy, under Fred- erick II., included the revival of portraiture in the form of busts, such as those of Fredei ick liiiu- M'lf. and of his ministers, evidently imitated from the antique. The art of the Fifteenth Century was so thoroughly humanistic that portraiture was one of its favorite modes of expression. The permanent resurrection of the bust was then effected by Donatello, who was equally success- ful in his portraits of men, which were forceful, of women, which wei'e graceful, and of children, where the real child-type was for the first, time expressed in art with perfect mastery. His little busts of the Infant Christ and Saint .John are among his most charming works. The Floren- tine School continued in this new field. Desi- derio da Settignano and Mino da Fiesole were especially successful. In the Sixteenth Century the Lombard School of Portraits was more real- istic, especially the branch established at Mo- dena, which was partial to terra-cotta;uui colored busts. The fashion then spread to other nations, esiiecially to France and Germany, where busts were executed in the prevalent styles, though none equal those of the Fifteenth Century, ex- cept a few of the most recent examples, especially in France. Since the Sixteenth Century, portraiture has preferred to express itself in painting, and this How far short ordinary modern acliievement falls in this field may be judged by comparing the series of marble busts of great Italians dot- ted about the Pincian Gardens in Rome with any corresponding collection of ancient busts. King Ludwig I. of Bavaria gathered in his W'allialla a remarkalde collection of busts. BiiiLiooRAPiiT. Several attempts have been made to publish sets of illustrations reiiroduc- ing ancient busts. Such was the irum llliis- Irium Imnniiics of Fulvio Orsini (Rome, l.^fiO; Antwerp, lOnO). The first scientific classification was by Visconti (q.v. ) in his Iciinoijrnphie firecquc (Paris, 1811), and Ironofiraphir Uitine (Paris. 1817). Bernouilli has given in his Die crluilteiu'ii liildnisse beriikmler (Iriechcn (Basel, 1877) a brief and very incomplete account of Greek portraits, and in his Riimische Ikono- graphic (4 vols., Stuttgart, 1882-94) a far fuller reproduction of Roman portraits. The dorpus
 * )art of the plastic sense has not been active.