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.

中文翻译：

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调色板作为早期现代自画像中的签名和编码身份

在对早期现代自画像的研究中，调色板通常被忽视为风格和身份的参考，无论是个人还是集体（家庭、性别、年龄和国籍）。然而，调色板不仅是一般绘画的静音属性，而且是自我声明的有力场所：这就是我；这是我的风格; 这就是我画画的方式；这就是我渴望成为的人。在最直接的层面上，画家通过直接在调色板上或附在调色板上刻上签名或座右铭来识别自己。身份识别可能与其他身份标记（嵌入的自画像；纹章）或构图（签名角的调色板）相关。画家使用带有意义的视觉语法在调色板上部署颜料。颜料如何排列，按什么顺序，有序或无序，混合或未触及，提供令人回味但难以捉摸的线索，测试观众对技术秘密的了解。它们是密码学的一种形式。这篇文章表明，画家希望观众将他们的调色板解释为自我表达和对包含它们的自画像的元评论。