The Dulwich Picture Gallery in London will be presenting, for the first time, an exhibition of 50 selfportraits from the famous Uffizi Gallery, made by major artists such as Velazquez, Filippino Lippi, Rembrandt, Tintoretto, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Pistoletto and Chagall. The event will be opened until the 15th of July 2007 and is offering the British audience an unique chance of discovering some of the best selfportraits in history, and also to see how great minds of art saw themselves.
The treasures of art are usually kept in the so-called Vasari Corridor, which links Palazzo Vecchio and Palazzo Pitti, and are very rarely exhibited for the public, so the exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery is a rare opportunity. The collection at the Uffizi Gallery has a long and fascinating history, as it was founded at the middle of the 17th century by Cardinal Leopoldo de Medici, who collected the first works. Over the centuries, his successors continued amassing works of art, and nowadays the collection has around 1600 self-portraits by various artists, thus covering more than six centuries of Western art and making it maybe the richest of it's kind in the world.
It is fascinating to discover how a great artist like Chagall or Velasquez chose to picture himself, and how the everchanging fashions, techniques and styles influenced the genre of selfportrait over the centuries.
June 2007
