Self-portrait

Orazio Riminaldi was a Pisa man who went to Rome as a young painter, in the years when Caravaggio's followers were everywhere, and he came home carrying that manner with him. Strong light, deep shadow, ordinary faces caught close up. He painted this self-portrait around 1625, near the height of a career that had made him the leading painter of Pisa. It did not last long. In 1630 plague swept through Tuscany, and Riminaldi died of it in his home city at 37, leaving his large altarpiece of Saint Cecilia's martyrdom, now also in the Uffizi, as the work he is best remembered by. Here he simply looks out at us, dressed plainly, a working painter rather than a courtier.