A hidden self-portrait is a painter's own face set inside a larger scene: a bystander in a crowd, a reflection in a glass, a detail few would spot without being told. Each of the twelve paintings below carries one.
Their makers were paid to depict kings, saints or surgeons. A few wrote their names beside their faces. Others were recognized only centuries later, and one wears a badge that may have been added after his death.
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How These Were Chosen
The habit is old, and it had practical reasons. A face slipped into the crowd worked as a signature that could not be scraped off, and the artist was a model who cost nothing.
It could also be a claim of rank. A painter who stood in the same frame as the kings, saints and patrons who paid him was saying that his work earned him a place among them.
That idea set the rule for choosing the twelve. Every picture here shows something else, a feast, an operation, a royal family, with its maker tucked inside it. Some of these faces are proven and others only believed, and each entry says which.
12. Pieter Claesz, Vanitas Still Life with Violin and Glass Ball (about 1628)
A glass ball on a wooden table holds a tiny reflection: a man at an easel, painting. Around the ball lie a skull, a violin on a stack of books, an overturned wine glass, a cracked walnut, an oil lamp, a chiming watch and some writing gear, all set against a dark background.
Pieter Claesz painted this small oak panel about 1628 in Haarlem, a prosperous Dutch city near Amsterdam. There, such a table had a known meaning. Pictures of this kind are called vanitas still lifes, after the Latin word for emptiness, and their objects are read as signs of passing time, and of how little of it anyone gets.
The man in the glass is identified as Claesz himself, at work on the very still life spread out before him, and the panel is titled Vanitas Still Life with Self-Portrait. That reading rests on the reflection alone, since no signature or monogram is documented on the front.
If it is right, Claesz has put himself among the warnings. The skull is only a symbol of death. The reflection is a living man, and it would vanish the moment he stood up from his easel.
It was also a display of skill. A curved surface bends everything it shows, and rendering a convincing reflection in one was a hard exercise.
At a Glance
Artist: Pieter Claesz (dated works from 1621 to 1660), Dutch
Painted: About 1628
Medium: Oil on oak panel
Size: 35.9 × 59 cm (14.1 × 23.2 in)
Where to see it: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg
11. Benozzo Gozzoli, Procession of the Magi (1459 to about 1460)
On the east wall of the Magi Chapel in Florence, a long line of riders winds through the hills. One of them wears a cap lettered OPUS BENOTII, Latin for the work of Benozzo. Benozzo Gozzoli put his own name on his own head, in a room where the people paying for the work had a say in nearly everything he did.