Self-Portrait

For more than two centuries nobody knew whose face this was. In 1763 an inventory listed the canvas as a head of a man from the school of Ludovico Carracci, the Bolognese painter, and in 1829 the Torlonia family recorded it as a head of a middle-aged man by Carracci. Only in the early 1990s did three scholars, Marco Gallo, Gianni Papi and Rossella Vodret, each working separately, arrive at Orazio Borgianni. The face matches a drawing of him by the portraitist Ottavio Leoni, now in the Albertina in Vienna, and his own self-portrait in Rome's Accademia di San Luca. For a painter's self-portrait it is a very sparing picture, the head alone against a plain ground. The brows are raised, the head slightly tilted, the look comes from a little below with a glint of knowing wit, and a veil of shadow slips across the face. When he painted it is still argued. Papi sees in the hollow face the illness that killed Borgianni early in 1616 and places it around 1614 or 1615, Gallo finds no sign of decline and dates it to about 1608 or 1609, and the museum gives 1615 to 1616. Borgianni's will, drawn up on 30 November 1615, left yet another self-portrait to his pupil Pietro Campiglia.