Self-portrait in his studio

Most self-portraits stop at the artist's face. This one lets you into the room. Michelangelo Cerquozzi paints himself at the easel in his Roman studio, brush raised, and in the foreground kneels his subject, an old man stripped to the waist at a reading stand. He is a hired model, holding the pose for a figure of Saint Jerome, the scholar-hermit so often shown half-naked among his books. So we watch a picture being built from life, the ordinary man in the studio becoming a saint on the canvas. Cerquozzi earned two very different nicknames in his day, one for his battle scenes and one for his small scenes of Roman street life. Here he simply shows how the work was done. The Uffizi bought the painting only in 2017.