Self-portrait

By the 1670s the Medici had spent years assembling a gallery of painters' self-portraits, asking artists across Italy and beyond to send their own likeness to Florence. Dolci made this one for that collection in 1674, when he was 58. He shows himself twice: the painted man in plain working clothes, holding his brushes, and in his hands a drawing of the same face, so his features look out from two surfaces at once. He wears spectacles, the eye of a man who had spent a lifetime finishing pictures to an almost enamel smoothness now needing help to see the work up close.