Self-portrait

The Galli da Bibiena were the great theatre-builders of their age, a family whose painted stage sets and opera houses spread from Bologna across Europe. Francesco was among the first of them to design not only the scenery but the buildings that held it. He raised theatres in Vienna for two emperors, and others in Verona, in Nancy and in Rome, filling them with the steep, dizzying perspectives the family made famous. Here there is no stage machinery and no vanishing colonnade, only the man who conjured them, looking out at us. He had trained as a figure painter under Bologna masters before architecture took over his life, and it is that earlier skill, the quiet handling of a face, that this portrait shows.