Автопортрет

Tintoretto painted this looking straight into a mirror when he was near 70, in the last years of a long Venetian career. He gives himself nothing flattering. The face comes at you dead center, frontal and symmetrical, the eyes reddened and steady, the white hair and beard swallowing the lower half of the picture, everything else dissolving into brown dark. There is no setting, no sign of his trade, no gesture, just an old man refusing to look away from what age has done to him. Centuries later Edouard Manet made a careful copy of this canvas and called it one of the most beautiful paintings in the world. Tintoretto died a few years after finishing it, still one of the busiest painters in Venice.