Ages of life and self-painting

This paper examines the relationship between self-portrait and age. What are the criteria – i.e. the sensibilities of time, of places, and of the artists themselves – which prompt painters to exhibit – or not – their own image at different ages of their lives ? The paper principally focuses on the cases of modern artists. Its aim is to show how some of them decided to stop to produce self-portraits after a certain age, thus choosing to pass down a glorious image of themselves, while others preemptively cherished, and sometimes even exalted, the image of extreme old age. The paper revolves around the cases of Leonardo da Vinci, Dürer, Rubens, Poussin, and Rembrandt.