Note 7 — BERNINI

In the Museum at Weimar is a portrait on which is written that it was done by Bernini himself, and as an autoritratto it has been published by Fraschetti (p. 433). It is a wretched performance, done not by Bernini, but by someone who had neither an observant eye nor a well-trained hand.

There is still another portrait which I think is very probably of him. It hangs in the Capitoline Gallery in Rome (Plate II), where it is called “Portrait of Velasquez, by himself,” an attribution which no student of Velasquez would maintain to-day. The shape of the head and face and the expression are extremely like Bernini. Even the different shape and angle of the two eyebrows is the same as in his portraits. The quality of the hair is the same, and the way it grows over the temples. In the earlier portraits of him the hair is parted on the right side as in the Capitoline picture. The nose is very nearly the same as in the pencil portraits by himself in the National Gallery in Rome and in the Chigi collection.