Self-Portrait

Around 1806 the Brera academy began gathering portraits of painters, one room of faces, and Giuseppe Bossi, its secretary, was assembling them. The trouble with Domenico Aspari is that he had more or less stopped painting. He made his living from copper plates and a burin, cutting views of Milan, and taught figure drawing in this building from 1776 until he retired in 1826. So the canvas is a rare thing by him, a face done in oil by a man whose hand was trained on metal, worked close to the skin and lit from one side. The museum prints the date as 1805 with a question mark; nobody has pinned it down further. Three years after that, the collection Bossi was putting together opened to the public as the Pinacoteca. The portrait is still in the building, in Room XXXV.