Self-portrait

Andrea Pozzo was one of the great illusionists of Baroque Rome, the Jesuit lay brother who painted ceilings that seem to open straight into the sky, and he built this self-portrait around exactly that skill. Grand Duke Cosimo III of Tuscany asked him for it in the 1680s for the Medici collection of artists' portraits. Rather than simply sit for us, Pozzo turns at an angle and points. His right hand indicates a painting on an easel, a domed interior rendered in the steep perspective he was famous for, possibly the illusory dome he devised for a church in Arezzo. His left hand rests on three books, his treatises on perspective that were still unpublished when he posed. So the portrait shows the man by showing his trade, the art of making flat paint read as soaring architecture. That trade would carry him to Vienna, where he spent his final years.