Self-Portrait

In 1806 Gaspare Landi, then about 50, painted two small canvases of exactly the same size. One shows his friend, the sculptor Antonio Canova. This one shows himself, and he wrote the pairing into the paint. The Canova is inscribed "Landi painted Canova in Rome in the year 1806", and this one says simply "Landi himself. Rome, the year 1806". There is no palette and no brush, nothing to announce that the sitter is a painter. He turns his head over his shoulder toward us, grey hair tied back with a black ribbon, in a dark blue coat with a frilled shirt front, against a plain dark background. The two portraits stayed together, and in 1919 they came to the Galleria Borghese from Baron Otto Messinger. Today they are kept in the gallery's storerooms and are not on display.