Self-portrait

This face was painted in October 1606, when Cristofano Allori was a young man of about 29, already a rising name in Florence at a time when the city's painting was turning away from the cool artifice of the previous generation toward something warmer and more direct. Allori worked in both religious pictures and portraits, and the care he usually spent on a sitter's likeness is turned here on his own. When he made it there was no gallery of artists' self-portraits to paint for. That Medici collection came together later in the century, under Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici, who gathered such faces from across Europe, and Allori's was drawn in among them. He looks out plainly, a working painter rather than a grand personage, dated to a single month of a single year.