Self-portrait

By 1770 Pompeo Batoni had spent decades as one of Rome's most admired painters, and this is the face he chose to leave of himself. The Uffizi in Florence had been gathering portraits of artists by their own hand since the previous century, a collection begun by Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici, and to be invited into it was a quiet honour among painters. Batoni presents himself directly, in the dress of a working gentleman, studying his own features with the same clear drawing and cool, even light his sitters knew. There is no grand setting, only the man himself. The canvas still hangs in that gallery of self-portraits under an old inventory number, one painter's face kept among hundreds.