Self-portrait with palette and brush

This face hangs among hundreds of others in the Uffizi's gallery of artists' self-portraits, a collection the Medici began building in the 1660s by asking painters across Europe for their own likeness. Simone Pignoni was the local contribution, a Florentine who trained in the studio of Francesco Furini and spent his whole career in the city, painting soft, sensuous saints and mythological women. Here he sets that world aside and shows the tools of the trade, a palette and a brush held toward us. He painted this around 1680, in his late sixties, one of the last working links to the refined Florentine manner of the generation before him.