Self-portrait

In 1930 the Venice Biennale, Italy's great international art show, opened for the seventeenth time, and among the paintings on the walls was this self-portrait by Giuseppe Amisani. It did well enough there that the Uffizi bought it for its collection of artists' faces. Amisani was a society portraitist of the Belle Epoque, the fashionable decades before the First World War. He had trained in Milan and made his name painting elegant sitters, among them the silent-film star Lyda Borelli, whose portrait won him a prize in 1912. Here he turns that practised eye on himself, a man of nearly 50 who had spent his career flattering others. He would live another eleven years, dying in 1941 on the shore of Lake Maggiore in the north.