Self Portrait of Gianlorenzo Bernini

By the time Bernini painted this face, around 1635, he was the busiest sculptor in Rome, finishing the great bronze canopy over the altar of St Peter's for Pope Urban VIII. Painting was the thing he did on the side, mostly for himself, and only a few dozen of his canvases have survived. A striking number of them are self-portraits, this one among the sharpest, with the dark eyes and slightly wary expression of a man used to studying faces in order to carve them. It hangs in the Uffizi, in the gallery's long-standing collection of artists' portraits of themselves, where a sculptor's painting of his own head sits beside those of men who painted for a living.