The Portrait of the Artist

With “The Portrait of the Artist. In the mirror of Narcissus. The Face, the Mask, the Selfie”, a major exhibition curated by Cristina Acidini, Fernando Mazzocca, Francesco Parisi and Paola Refice, the Fondazione Cassa dei Risparmi di Forlì and the Museo Civico San Domenico inaugurate the 2025 season with a new long journey among masterpieces that reconstruct the progressive definition of the artist’s self-image in the history of art.

The itinerary of the exhibition runs from the former church of San Giacomo to the large rooms on the second floor that made up the library of the Convent of San Domenico. From antiquity to the twentieth century, the self-portrait is the sublime reminder of the myth of Narcissus told by Ovid in the Metamorphoses: the reflection of Narcissus is the artist’s self-reflection. In De pictura, Leon Battista Alberti takes the figure reflected in the source as a model for artists, theorising the visual arts as speculative arts and introducing the figure of the artist as a man of letters, the protagonist of his own time. Alberti’s Narcissus inaugurated the role of the artist in modernity, who bequeathed his image to posterity by making his work eternal.

The artist’s portrait is an existential autograph. Sign, trace, memory, reflection to be translated into a definitive image, played out in time, against time, beyond time. In the self-portrait, the painter doubles himself in the dual role of model and artist. The eye rests on the reflected image to portray itself, and the portrayed image is an alter of itself and is a self. Often a mask emerges. A character rather than a person.

This is the case of many artists, from the fifteenth century to the twentieth, from Giovanni Bellini, Tintoretto, Sofonisba Anguissola, Lotto, Pontormo, Parmigianino, Rembrandt, Tiziano, Hayez, Böcklin, De Chirico, Balla, Sironi, Bill Viola and Chuck Close. “The Portrait of the Artist” is a story in pictures, a fascinating and eloquent insight into one of the most universal and important themes in art.

The exhibition features over 200 masterpieces from collections across Europe, including the Uffizi Gallery and the Bargello Museum in Florence, the Doria Pamphilj Gallery, the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome, the National Galleries of Ancient Art in Rome, the National Art Gallery in Bologna, the Apostolic Library of the Vatican, the Carrara Academy in Bergamo, the Royal Museums of Turin, the MART in Rovereto, the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée Moreau in Paris, the Belvedere Gallery in Vienna, the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Strasbourg, the Kunsthalle Bremen, the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico, the Denver Art Museum, and many others.