Autoportrait en jeune homme

Around 1623 Bernini was 25 and already the sculptor half of Rome wanted, yet here he is doing something he seldom did, painting. He picked up a brush only now and then, and this small canvas is thought to be one of his first attempts. He caught himself with a tense, almost combative stare, and that is the telling part. At exactly this moment he was carving his marble David for Cardinal Scipione Borghese, and to find the strain of a body winding up to hurl a stone he studied his own face in a mirror. The same gritted, watchful look he gave that David stares out of this picture. When the Borghese acquired the little painting in 1919, it was not even listed as his work, but under another artist's name.