Self-Portrait

Around 1820, in Florence, the Genevan porcelain painter Abraham Constantin worked side by side with Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who was living in the city at the time. Together they studied and copied paintings in Florentine collections, Raphael and Titian among them, and Ingres drew Constantin's portrait in pencil and watercolour. That drawing became the only model for Constantin's own self-portraits. He painted seven of them, in enamel on porcelain. In this one he changed the clothes and added the dome of St Peter's in Rome, seen on the left, variations in which the art historian Fernando Mazzocca saw a singular Nazarene air, after the German painters in Rome who took early Raphael as their model. The plaque is signed and dated 1824 on the cover of the book lying on the table. Another version from the same year is in the Uffizi, and a third, dated 1831, is in Geneva.