Self-portrait

By 1540 the man in this portrait was less a painter than a one-man building department. Giulio Romano had left Rome years earlier, where he had been Raphael's chief assistant and heir, to run the artistic affairs of the Gonzaga court in Mantua, designing the Palazzo Te and reworking the city's churches and streets. This likeness is drawn not in oil but in coloured chalks, a soft dry medium still uncommon in Italy at that date. It later belonged to Cardinal Flavio Chigi and reached the Medici in 1675, joining the Uffizi's growing gallery of artists' own faces. He died in Mantua in 1546, a few years after sitting for it, worn out by the workload Vasari says the Gonzaga kept piling on him.