Self-portrait

In the 17th century the Medici began gathering the portraits that artists had made of themselves, and that collection, still hanging in the Uffizi, is where this picture has long lived under the name of Diego Velázquez, court painter to Philip IV of Spain. It shows a dark-haired man in the plain black dress of the Spanish court, turned to face us. For generations visitors took it as Velázquez looking at himself around 1645, at the height of his years in Madrid. Most scholars now doubt that his hand was ever on it, and read it instead as the work of his studio or a later follower. The debate has not settled, and the museum still shows it among the self-portraits where the Medici first placed it.