Resumen de Palettes as Signatures and Encoded Identities in Early-Modern Self-Portraits
In studies of early-modern self-portraiture, palettes are usually overlooked as references to style and identity, whether individual or collective (family, gender, age, and nationality). Palettes, however, are not only mute attributes of painting in general but potent sites of self-declaration: this is who I am; this is my style; this is how I make paintings; this is who I aspire to be. At its most literal level, painters identified themselves by inscribing a signature or motto either directly on or attached to the palette. The identification could be relational within a nexus of other identity markers (an embedded self-portrait; coat of arms) or compositional (palettes in signature corners). Painters deployed pigments on palettes with a visual syntax that carried meaning. How the pigments are arranged, in which sequence, orderly or disorderly, mixed or untouched, provide evocative but elusive clues that test a viewer’s knowledge of technical secrets. They are a form of cryptography. This essay shows that painters expected viewers to interpret their palettes as self-expression and as meta-commentaries on the self-portrait that contains them.
