Bust is a sculpted portrait depicting only the head, shoulders, and upper chest of a subject.
The portrait bust depicts only the head, shoulders, and upper chest of its subject and emerged as a major sculptural form in ancient Rome, where the practice descended from the wax 'imagines' kept of patrician ancestors. Republican Roman busts are remarkable for their veristic realism: warts, wrinkles, and scars were rendered with documentary precision. Imperial busts, by contrast, idealised their subjects according to political needs. The form was revived in the Italian Renaissance, with portraits by Mino da Fiesole, Antonio Rossellino, and Verrocchio. Bernini brought it to its baroque peak with the 1632 bust of Cardinal Scipione Borghese and the late, devastating bust of Costanza Bonarelli (c. 1638), the only sculpted portrait of a woman of non-noble status to survive from his hand. Houdon's busts of the philosophes (Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot) and the founders of the United States (Washington, Jefferson, Franklin) are among the most psychologically penetrating portraits in any medium.