Self-portrait

By 1837 Pietro Benvenuti had directed the Florence Academy of Fine Arts for more than thirty years, through Napoleon's rule over Tuscany and the return of the grand dukes who followed. In that year he gave this self-portrait to the Uffizi, and that December the gallery formally approved its place in the long line of painters' self-portraits it had been assembling for generations. It was a quiet kind of arrival. The man who had trained a large share of Tuscany's artists now took his own place on the wall among them, showing himself plainly in late maturity, one more face in a collection he had spent his career helping to shape.