Self-Portrait
Details
The story
Venice in the early 1580s was a city full of scaffolding. Two fires, in 1574 and 1577, had gutted the state rooms of the Doge's Palace, and the Republic was handing out the largest painting commissions in the city to fill those walls again. Palma il Giovane was one of the men getting that work.
This is the earliest self-portrait he left. He puts himself close to us, in a hat and a fur-trimmed coat, brush in hand, working on a canvas of the risen Christ that the frame cuts off before much of it can be seen. The museum reads the expression as self-assurance with a certain swagger in it.
Where the picture hung before is not documented. It came to Brera in 1811, handed over by the state to the young gallery.
