Self-portrait

The Uffizi has kept a gallery of artists' self-portraits since the 1600s, when Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici began collecting them, and being asked to add your own face was a quiet mark of arrival. Vittorio Matteo Corcos sent his in 1913, near the height of a career spent painting the fashionable society of Italy and France. Wealthy families competed for him, and he is best remembered for Sogni of 1896, a young woman on a bench whose direct, faintly bored gaze struck viewers as startlingly modern. Here he turns on himself the same flattering attention he gave his clients. He was 53, and less than a year later the comfortable world he had spent his life painting would be pulled into the First World War. Corcos went on working in Florence, where he lived until 1933.