Self-portrait

This is how Gabbiani saw himself around 1685, in his early thirties, not long back in Florence after years in Rome and a stay in Venice with the portrait painter Sebastiano Bombelli, whose smooth, assured manner you can feel here. The more unusual story is where the picture ended up. Gabbiani kept it, and after his death it passed to his pupil Ignazio Hugford, who also wrote the painter's life. In 1762 it was engraved to stand at the front of that biography, and in 1779, more than 50 years after Gabbiani died, the whole Hugford collection was bought for the grand-ducal gallery and the portrait came with it. It hangs in the Uffizi now, among the gallery's long line of artists' self-portraits.