Self-portrait

By 1675 Giovanni Maria Morandi was one of the busiest portrait painters in Rome, the man popes and cardinals sat for when they wanted to be remembered well. He had been born in Florence and trained there, then built his whole career in the papal city. This picture belongs to a peculiar Florentine project. A generation earlier Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici had begun collecting artists' self-portraits, asking painters across Europe to send in their own likeness, and the Uffizi has been adding to that gallery of faces ever since. So Morandi, a Florentine who had made his name elsewhere, painted himself for the city he came from. He shows himself turned toward us, well dressed and self-assured, the way a man looks when portraits are what other people pay him for.