Augusto Bastianini

Augusto Bastianini was a Tuscan painter, born in 1875 in Monteguidi, a village near Casole d'Elsa in the hills south of Siena. He spent his working life in Florence, where he died in 1938.

He is remembered above all for one canvas: the self-portrait he painted around 1900, when he was only 25. That early picture, confident and closely observed, is generally counted as his finest work. His widow gave it to the Uffizi in 1941, and it entered the gallery's long-running collection of artists' self-portraits, the tradition by which painters from across Europe left their own faces to Florence.

In 2023 the Uffizi sent the portrait back toward his birthplace, showing it in the civic museum of Casole d'Elsa alongside other paintings by him, as part of the 'Uffizi Diffusi' project that lends works out to small Tuscan towns.