Self-Portrait as a Young Man

Around 1560 Barocci was in his mid-twenties, and this is how he chose to present himself: alert, carefully dressed, a young painter confident of his gifts. He had grown up in Urbino, the small hill town in the Marche region where Raphael had been born a generation earlier, and he was still weighing a career in Rome, the city every ambitious Italian artist was drawn to. He turns his head slightly, as if he has just looked up from the panel in front of him, and the plain dark background throws all the attention onto the face. It is among the earliest surviving images of a painter who would go on to spend almost his whole life working away from the great art centres.