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Unlike the portrait, self-portraiture is a genre in its own right that distinguishes and characterises a particular subject, namely the artist. It is the image of an exceptional personality, of a subjectivity one feels is unique and incomparable: a man (to paraphrase Petrarch) who makes his own image into a reflection of what he embodies at a certain point in history. Born in the Italian Renaissance—at the same time as the portrait and the autonomous status of art and the artiste—, self-portraiture was a new space in which the artist could express himself. Through it the artist could proclaim his existence and seek, like the mirror image of Narcissus, the unique presence that inhabited him and the artistic status he needed.

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