Self-portrait

When Livio Mehus painted himself around 1670, he was feeding a passion of the Medici court. In these years Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici was gathering the self-portraits of artists from across Europe, writing to painters to ask for their own likeness, and building one of the largest collections of its kind anywhere. Mehus was close at hand, a Flemish-born painter who had spent his career in the service of the Medici, so his face took its place among the rest. He was about 40 when he made it. The collection he joined never stopped growing. Today the Uffizi keeps well over 1,600 artists' faces, and his belongs to the early generation that first gave the gathering its fame.