Self-portrait

Sartorio painted this in 1915, the year Italy entered the First World War, and it is hard to hold the face apart from the moment. He was 55, a well-known Roman painter of grand Symbolist scenes, and rather than watch from his studio he volunteered for the front. Within months he was fighting along the Isonzo river, where Austrian troops captured him and held him prisoner for close to two years. This self-portrait belongs to the threshold year, before any of that happened, the steady look of a man about to leave the world of paint for the world of trenches. He kept working even in captivity, drawing what he saw around him. The Uffizi set the canvas in its long line of artists' self-portraits, where it sits among far calmer faces.