BUSSY-RABUTIN, bn'sP' ra'bu'VaN', ROGER, Comte de (1618-93). A French soldier and courtier, the author of the llistoire amoureuse des Gaules (1665). This work is a thinly veiled version of the notorious Court scandals of his own time, and in part, at least, of his own creation. It created a deep sensation and influenced the de velopment of the realistic novel toward the ficti tious memoir. Bussy-Rabutin was a relative of line. de SeVimai (q.v.), came of an illustrious family, and was educated by the Jesuits. The Ilistoire was written for private circulation among friends, but was surreptitiously copied and published by the Marchioness de &tne in Holland with an entirely superfluous key. Bussy Rabutin was arrested (1665), imprisoned for thirteen months in the Bastille, and then exiled to Burgundy, where he spent the remainder of his life in peace. Meanwhile the work grew by un authorized and more outrageous additions in prose and verse. hussy's original portion is an airy, graceful, but very realistic picture of a corrupt society, which perhaps no other author could have given. Bussy's .11('moires, of minor interest, appeared in 1696, and his Lettres 1697 1709.
BUST (Fr. baste, It. busto, from Med. Lat. bust um, the trunk of the body). In plastic art. the name given to a representation in the round of the bead, neck, and breast of the human body. It was a form of sculpture apparently unknown to Egyptian, Assyrian, and other Oriental arts, though the Egyptians of the early Empire made fine portrait heads. As early as the Sixth Cen tury u.c. time Greeks made Hernia, heads of Hermes or Dionysus, amounted on pillars, and this form, common for time ideal heads of the Sixth and Fifth centuries, was used as the favorite form of bust until the Roman period. At this time they were often made double—two heads hack to hack. It was not until Alexander's time that busts were commonly used for pur poses of portraiture in Greece, for until then sculpture had concerned itself less with realistic reproduction than with types. After that time the bust became perhaps the favorite form of portraiture. The two most important known series are portraits of Alexander—with the head drawn down on one side and the eyes raised—and of his successors the Ptolemies of Egypt and the Seleueids of Syria, as well as the minor kings of the Ilellenie East. such as the Attands. 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, Isocrates, and Demosthenes. To these authentic portraits should he added ideal heads of earlier personages, such as Homer, Pericles, Anaxagoras, and other early philoso phers, 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 Capitoline 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 public 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 apparently not contemporary. Even the heads of the elder Scipio Africanus are of doubtful authenticity. The custom of col lections of lures and petioles popularized the use of busts, as did the founding of libraries, mu.