Umberto Brunelleschi was an extremely talented painter, illustrator, fashion, costume and stage designer endowed with an all-round, modern artistic vision. Born in Montemurlo (Tuscany), he spent most of his life in Paris. La Ville Lumiére in those years offered enormous opportunities to talented artists such as Brunelleschi. He first visited Paris in 1900, on the occasion of the Exposition Universelle, together with his friends Giovanni Costetti and Ardengo Soffici, who had already made a name for themselves in Florence at that time.
Given his exceptional skills and taste, Brunelleschi quickly established himself as one of the most sought-after illustrators in Paris, working with the city's most prestigious magazines and becoming a close friend of fellow artists such as Pablo Picasso, Chaïm Soutine, Kees Van Dongen, André Derain and, in particular, Amedeo Modigliani.
During the second decade of the 20th century Brunelleschi added costume and set design to his active repertoire, beginning a long and fruitful relationship with the stage arts that culminated in Puccini’s request for him to design the original costumes and some of the scenery for the opera Turandot.
And at the same time that Maurice Ravel’s Shèherazade and Igor Stravinsky L'Oiseau de feu ballets were receiving triumphant receptions in the city, Brunelleschi showed a number of panels inspired by Verlaine's Fêtes Galantes (which had, just a few years earlier, been set to music by Claude Debussy) at the Salon des Humoristes, inaugurating a new and important theme – Venetian 18th century stage masks – which was to become enormously popular.
Following his service in the Italian Army during the First World War, he returned to Paris. In the 1920s he diversified into set and costume designs for the Folies Bergère, the Casino de Paris, the Théâtre du Châtelet as well as for theatres in America, Germany, as well as in Italy. Back home, he worked for opera houses such as La Scala in Milan, and the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in Florence. He also created costumes for Josephine Baker as well as designs for the Parisian couturiers, Martial et Armand.
Brunelleschi's style was initially formed in the French Art Nouveau climate, but it gradually evolved into an original style that, although inspired by Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations, also included 18th century Venetian influences and orientalist designs inspired by the Ballets Russes.
In the wake of Watteau and alongside Picasso and, later, Severini, Brunelleschi made a major contribution with his neo-Venetian works to keep alive a strong interest in the masks of the Commedia dell'Arte – an interest that was later to turn into an outright fashion in the Art Déco movement in the 1920s. He published Les Masques et les Personnages de la Comédie Italienne in Paris in 1914 and exhibited his original temperas at that year's edition of the Venice Biennale.
He was 41 years old when he painted this striking Self-portrait with a puppet and a mask, which is signed and dated 1920, just after he returned to Paris after serving in the war. The composition includes, in the background, a “Commedia dell' Arte” mask and a puppet: Brunelleschi used to model such figurines in wax and wood, which were highly regarded by collectors and intellectuals such as Marquise Luisa Casati.
The artist is portraying himself half-length, his body in profile with its slender neck and his head turning towards the viewer, wearing a cofident expression. He sports a shiny black cloak and what may well be a traditional painter's black shirt and one can make out a corner of his palette lower left.
The sophisticated palette used by Brunelleschi is relying on strong chromatic contrasts, in particular between the jet-black of the cape and the light, shiny shades of white, blue, grey and pink, which are a tribute to Central-Italian Renaissance and Mannerist anti-naturalism. The use of colour in this Self-portrait transcends imitation and reality, becoming symbolic: together with the mask, the puppet and the magnetic glance, it is a visual device used by Brunelleschi to depict his personality and establish himself as one of the most eclectic and successful artistic figures in Paris at the time. In fact, a few years later, in 1929, the artist was awarded the Légion- d'Honneur for artistic merit. A later Self-potrait, dated 1934, is held at the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.