Self-portrait

This face belongs to Domenico Corvi, a painter from Viterbo who spent his working life in Rome. It hangs in one of the more unusual collections in Florence, the Uffizi's gathering of artists' self-portraits, begun by a Medici cardinal in the 17th century and grown over generations into a gallery where painters look back at you by the hundred. To be asked for your self-portrait was itself a mark of standing. Corvi earned it as a bridge figure, working in the last warmth of the Baroque while his teaching pushed toward the cooler Neoclassical manner that was coming. Among his pupils was Vincenzo Camuccini, who would become one of the leading painters of Napoleonic Rome. Corvi presents himself plainly here, a working artist rather than a grandee.