Self-Portrait

The Brera can date this panel no more closely than somewhere between 1795 and 1799, and those years in Milan covered three governments: Austrian rule, then the French after Bonaparte's army arrived in 1796, then the Austrians and Russians back again in 1799. A Milanese painter's patrons changed with them.

It is a very small object, 19 centimetres by 15 and a half, oil on a piece of wood you could hold in one hand. Appiani's working life ran at the opposite scale, on ceilings and chapel walls measured out in square metres of wet plaster.

The national catalogue notes that the handling here is quicker and more liquid than the small size alone would explain. That looseness belongs to his portraits rather than to his religious and mythological pictures.