Self-portrait

The Uffizi keeps a whole gallery of artists looking back at you, their own faces, collected by the Medici from the 17th century onward. This small panel, a bearded man with a white cloth wound around his head, joined that collection in 1682, and by then someone had already enlarged it on all four sides to fit its new frame. It is listed as Beccafumi painted by himself. There is a catch worth knowing. No other portrait of the Sienese painter survives, so there is nothing to check the face against, and some scholars suspect it may be a study for a portrait of another man rather than the artist's own reflection. It is painted on paper, later laid down on wood, barely 32 centimetres tall, worked in ochre skin tones against browns, with quick flashes of light catching the collar and the folds of the headcloth.