Many portraits are not what they seem. Like all great masterpieces they are depictions of the artist's own mind.
However, unless you know this, you cannot see it which is why ordinary viewers rarely compare a portrait to a
self-portrait. When you do, the results in many cases are astonishing as the images in the galleries below reveal. 
They are not the only means, though, through which a portrait portrays the artist's own mind.

        
British Monarchs                                           French Portraits                                    Italian Portaits                       Portraits from the Low Countries

     
Spanish Portraits                                 American Portraits                      German Portraits  

Art Mystery: Two Holbein Portraits at the Metropolitan Museum

                                    
                      Member of Wedigh Family      Detail                      Benedikt von Hertensten      Detail

Face fusion, in which the artist combines his or her own features with those of the sitter, is not the only
way in which artists indicate the sitter is an alter ego. Although Holbein, whose two portraits above are
both in New York’s Metropolitan Museum, is known for the “precise realism” of his portraits, he often fused
his face with his sitters and others too.* However, he was just as likely to use other methods as well. In
the Portrait of a Member of the Wedigh Family Holbein identified his sitter through an abbreviated inscription
on the gold edge of the book. However, to indicate that the sitter really represents an aspect of himself,
he stamped the cover  of the same book with his initials, HH, thus placing his own sign over the sitter's
and in a more prominent position too.  

Holbein often used his initials for self-reference and was particularly fortunate that the king he
served, Henry VIII, shared the same initial. In the second portrait owned by the museum Holbein used his
initials again, this time more subtly. The inscription on the wall says in German: “When I looked like
this, I was 22 years old, 1517, H.H. painted it.” However, the top line, the one ostensibly referring to his
sitter, has the initials HH in the exact center of both the line and the wall. (The centering is more obvious
in the original than in the image here which has been cropped slightly.) The first H is even the last letter
of “ICH”, the I that refers to the sitter thus fusing their verbal identities. Once again, Holbein says to those
in the know: this painting is by me and of me, even if most people think it is of someone else.
 

* Scholars have already noted that despite Holbein’s reputation for physiognomic accuracy, he often altered
the features of his sitter’s faces.  Since such manipulation can have no meaning within the ruling paradigm –
that portraits are truthful likenesses of the sitter – they can only assume that he changed the features to
make the face more realistic.  Here is one nonsensical explanation from Lorne Campbell of a Holbein portrait in Berlin:

“Holbein has made many of his customary adjustments and the head, though doubtless a faithful likeness (my
emphasis), is far from a mechanically accurate record of the sitter’s features. As usual, the face is enlarged
and the cranium diminished; the nose is set further into profile than the rest of the face and its contour is
altered at the bridge so that the far eye, brought forward out of perspective, is seen in its entirety….” and he
continues to note more changes. See Campbell, Renaissance Portraits (New Haven: Yale) 1990, p. 34

 
* See how the contemporary artist, Elizabeth Peyton, also paints herself into her portraits of others.