Editing Donatello (section)

==Portraiture==
[[File:Desiderio da Settignano, portrait bust of Niccolò Uzzano, painted terracotta, c1450, Bargello, Florence 2.jpg|thumb|left|Bust of [[Niccolò da Uzzano]], 1430s?, attributed]]  
Other than tomb effigies, there is no sculpture by Donatello that is certainly intended to be a portrait. Some of his early statues of prophets for the cathedral were said to use the features of specific individuals.<ref>Vasari; [[Il Zuccone]] is one of these.</ref> Donatello probably never saw Gattamelata alive, and may not have had any good image to work from; his figure seems to have a generalized "Caesar-like head" and is "no portrait in the usual sense",<ref>Seymour, 124.</ref> but an "idealized portrait of brute power".<ref>Olson, 86 (quoted); Avery, 88 suggests a death mask may have been used, but Gammelata was in his seventies when he died, and the face on the statue looks younger.</ref> 

During Donatello's career, the distinctive Florentine flat-bottomed bust portrait became established and popular among the city's elite, led by the Medici.<ref>Seymour, 7, 123, 139.</ref> Donatello is only associated with one example, but this may be the earliest. [[Niccolò da Uzzano]] was a significant Medici political associate, as well as a banker and [[Renaissance humanism|humanist]], who died in 1431.<ref>[https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/niccolo-da-uzzano Treccani biography] (not 1433 as Olson, 91 says).</ref> The painted terracotta bust portrait of him may have been made using a life- or [[death mask]], presumably not very long after his death, at the latest. He is shown wearing an ancient Roman [[toga]], with "uncompromising realism", but an expression that "exudes sagacious strength and nobility". However the attribution to Donatello, the dating and foremost the quality of the bust itself are disputed.<ref>Olson, 91; the long catalogue entry in [https://books.google.com/books?id=iPP55b2Fk60C&pg=PA128 ''The Renaissance Portrait: From Donatello to Bellini'', ed. Patricia Lee Rubin, (Metropolitan Museum of Art/Bode-Museum), 2011, 126-128] attributes it to "Workshop of [[Desiderio da Settignano]]" from "c. 1450-55", noting that the attribution to Donatello is not recorded before 1745 "when almost all Florentine Quattrocento sculpture was, in confused fashion, ascribed to the Father of the Renaissance" (p. 126). Janson, 1957, 237–40, rejects the attribution to Donatello and hints at Desiderio da Settignano and followers in the 1460s–70s, due to the specific backward tilt of the head; among others he cites Ulrich Middeldorf who denies any artistic quality and speaks of a "complete lack of style in the modeling of the face." (Middeldorf, review of Hans Kauffmann, ''Donatello'', 1935, in: ''Art Bulletin'', 38, 1936, 570ff); lastly indecisive Georges Didi-Huberman, "Torsion, Pathos, Dis-Gratia. Neue kritische Überlegungen zur Büste des Niccolò Uzzano", in: Rowley 2022, 69–83.</ref>