Universal Principles of Art

7 AUTOBIOGRAPHY

THE ARTIST AS SUBJECT

In the fifteenth century, artists discovered the power of art as an autobiographical record. Painters such as Masaccio (1401–28) and Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506) occasionally slipped their own image into a crowd of figures in a religious painting. The Flemish artist Jan Van Eyck (1395–1441) included a tiny self-portrait in the reflection of a convex mirror in his famous Arnolfini Wedding. Entire paintings devoted to self-portraiture were rare. Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) twice painted himself with great attention to detail, and there are fine self-portrait drawings by Giovanni Bellini (c. 1430–1516) and Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519).

Rembrandt (1606–79) painted himself more than forty times and made more than ...