Self-portrait with a Book

By 1585 Tintoretto was in his late sixties and one of the senior painters of Venice, decades of enormous canvases behind him. This is how he chose to show himself: holding a book. In a painter's self-portrait that is a deliberate signal. Across the 16th century artists had been pressing the case that painting was a liberal art, the work of an educated mind and not merely a craft of the hands, and a book in the sitter's grip is the familiar emblem of that argument. He gives his own face the same plain treatment he gave paying clients, the head lifted out of a dark ground with no flattery. Portraits like this were later prized by collectors, and the Uffizi went on to gather one of the largest holdings of artists' self-portraits anywhere, begun a century after his death by Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici.