Self-portrait

By about 1635 Guido Reni was roughly 60 and the most sought-after painter in Bologna, known for luminous altarpieces full of upturned faces and soft, idealized beauty. This small self-portrait shows a different side of him. It stands barely half a metre tall, made for himself rather than for a church or a patron, and the face looking back is plain and unidealized. No costume, no gesture, just a man in dark clothing emerging from a darker ground, studying his own features with the same steady attention he gave his saints. He would be dead within seven years, in 1642. The little canvas later joined the Uffizi's collection of artists' self-portraits, the long gallery in the Vasari Corridor where painters from many centuries look out from the walls.