The urge to insert yourself slyly into a work or image you have created is not confined to Alfred Hitchcock or Colin Dexter, author of the Inspector Morse books. Renaissance painters loved to hide their own faces in the crowd or give Judas and other religious baddies the twisted leer of familiar swindling landlords or rapacious public figures. Nowadays, however, the chance of immortalising your own face as that of a saint comes less often. And if you do turn St Peter or St Paul into a self-portrait to hang in church, you’re likely to run into charges of narcissism or irreverence.
A new altarpiece of a parish church in southern Spain has stirred up a storm of disapproval because the central figures look uncannily
