Self-Portrait of Antonio Zona

Antonio Zona painted himself here at half length, turned three-quarters toward us, holding the viewer with a steady, almost searching look. He was a Venetian-trained painter, and the exact year he made this is not recorded, though it seems to fall around the middle of the century. The portrait's real story is how it reached this gallery. In 1892, the year Zona died, a collector offered it for sale here for 300 lire. The ministry first wanted to send it to the modern-art museum in Rome, but the architect and critic Camillo Boito argued it belonged in Venice instead, near the large canvas Zona is remembered for, his imagined meeting of the old masters Titian and Veronese beside the lagoon. So it stayed.