Self portrait of Joachim von Sandrart

Joachim von Sandrart painted this in 1666, and it helps to know what he would do next. Nine years later the German-born painter began publishing the Teutsche Academie, a vast collection of artists' lives that became the founding history of art in the German-speaking lands, and our main source for dozens of northern painters we would otherwise barely know. He had gathered the material by living it, working in Amsterdam during the Dutch golden age, in Rome, and across the courts of a Europe torn by the Thirty Years' War. So the man looking out here is a painter who was also becoming the keeper of other painters' memory. He recorded dozens of colleagues in that book, and his own face went on to join a gallery of artists' self-portraits, where it has stayed.