nalysis
this produced, forced them to such patient study of the face as would
enable them to give the features that look of belonging to one
consistent whole which we call character. Thus, at a time when painters
had not yet learned to distinguish between one face and another,
Donatello was carving busts which remain unrivalled as studies of
character, and Pisanello was casting bronze and silver medals which are
among the greatest claims to renown of those whose effigies they bear.

Donatello's bust of Niccolo d'Uzzano shows clearly, nevertheless, that
the Renaissance could not long remain satisfied with the sculptured
portrait. It is coloured like nature, and succeeds so well in producing
for an instant the effect of actual life as to seem uncanny the next
moment. Donatello's contemporaries must have had the same impression,
for busts of this kind are but few. Yet these few prove that the element
of colour had to be included before the satisfactory portrait was found:
in other words, that painting and not sculpture was to be the
portrait-art of the Renaissance.

The most creative sculptor of the earlier Renaissance was not the only
artist who felt the need of colour in portraiture. Vittore Pisano, the
greatest medallist of this or any age, felt it quite as keenly, and
being a painter as well, he was among the first to turn this art to
portraiture. In his day, however, painting was still too undeveloped an
art for the portrait not to lose in character what it gained in a more
lifelike colouring, and the two of Pisanello's portraits which still
exist are profiles much inferior to his best medals, seeming indeed to
be enlargements of them rather than original studies from life.

It was only in the next generation, when the attention of painters
themselves was powerfully concentrated upon the reproduction of strongly
pronounced types of humanity, that they began to make portraits as full
of life and energy as Donatello's busts of the previous period. Even
then, however, the full face was rarely attempted, and it was only in
the beginning of the sixteenth century that full-face portraits began to
be common. The earliest striking achievement of this sort, Mantegna's
head of Cardinal Scarampo (now in Berlin), was not the kind to find
favour in Venice. The full-face likeness of this wolf in sheep's
clothing brought out the workings of the self-seeking, cynical spirit
within too clearly not to have revolted the Venetians, who