oil on canvas, 60×50 cm
Signed and dated lower left P. Conti 1921
There is still a reminder, in this Self-Portrait with Mirror presented at the 1922 Florentine Primaverile and awarded by the City of Florence, of the 1914 self-portraits, where Conti lets his own painter’s tools or other elements appear, indirectly hinting at their presence in the reverse field. Here is the play of the pictorial prism, evoked in the backward stroke instituted by the easel in the mirror. The whole setting reveals Conti’s contemporary studies of the fifteenth century, but without the terse universe of that painting’s central period, rather with the restless mood of Mannerism, its bravura pieces keeping the spirit on an all-intellectual alert.
