Self-portrait

When he painted this, Alessandro Allori was about twenty, a young Florentine at the start of a long career at the Medici court. He shows himself plainly, turned toward us, a painter taking his own measure. Likenesses like this one later fed a peculiar Florentine project. In the 17th century Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici began gathering the self-portraits of artists into a single collection, a room of painters' faces, and the Uffizi holds that assembly still, one of the largest of its kind. Allori's own face from 1555 sits among them, the young version of a man who would spend the next fifty years painting altarpieces and Medici portraits.