If Jean Goujon has suggested anything of the duchess’s beauty in the head, it is with a restraint well calculated to baffle us. Besides the portraits on canvas or in marble there were also others, pen portraits, which were all the rage; and indeed in after years we find painters complaining of the competition thus set up against them by writers. Though portraits of this kind were necessarily less agitating, people amused themselves by seeking physical details in them; it was a feast for fine wits to “blazon,” as they said, this or that part of the body, and it may be that certain _blasons_[182] were less anonymous than they seem. This special art has given us one celebrated portrait which has not ceased to pique the curiosity and stimulate the sagacity of critics. The philosopher Nifo, a welcome guest in the house of the young Jeanne of Aragon, where he justified his presence by platonically courting one of the ladies-in-waiting, wished to offer the princess, with the orthodox dedication, a concise treatise on the Beautiful, and, to give his folio a certain piquancy, he inserted in it a portrait, complete, circumstantial, ruthless, a study in pathology and anatomy, of all the endowments visible and invisible of the young lady to whom the book was dedicated. In accepting the dedication, the princess took upon her shoulders the responsibility for the work. How could she approve of this dedication?—a remarkable problem which commentators have endeavoured to solve in every way but the right one. To us, at any rate, the explanation is very simple. All the critics have set out with the idea that Nifo was rashly indiscreet—a position difficult enough to defend, since a liberty officially sanctioned is one no longer, and, if fault it was, there is no trace of absolution. Now what was this alleged impudent fellow? A fortunate and braggart lover, say some. Can we conceive this old simpleton, forsooth, hideous, gouty, a mountain of flesh, a trifle ridiculous—who was overjoyed at courting a waiting-maid (who laughed in her sleeve at him)—boasting thus publicly of a conquest over the impeccable virtue of a young girl of eighteen, the pearl of Italy! That would have been no occasion for self-glorification: if the conquest had been really his, the book would have appeared without dedication.