Self-portrait at the Easel

Annibale Carracci painted this around 1604, and it is a strange, sidelong kind of self-portrait. Instead of facing us directly, his framed painted face sits propped on an easel in the studio, with his palette hanging beside it and a dog and a cat down at the easel's feet. These were hard years for him. He had just finished the vast ceiling of the Farnese Gallery in Rome, the labor of his life, and his patron Cardinal Farnese paid him so meanly that he sank into a deep melancholy. Within two years he had all but stopped painting. He died in 1609 and was buried, as he had asked, near Raphael in the Pantheon.