Self-portrait

The Uffizi holds one of the world's great collections of artists' portraits of themselves, gathered over centuries and once shown along the Vasari Corridor, the raised passage the Medici built across Florence. This is one of the older northern faces in it. Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen worked in Amsterdam in the early 1500s, when that city was still a modest town and a painter making his own likeness was an unusual thing to do at all. He shows himself plainly, turned toward us, a working artist rather than a grand man. Painters portraying themselves would become common a century later with figures like Rembrandt. In 1510 that was still a rarity.