A self-portrait provides an artist with the opportunity to choose what persona to present to the world. Clothing plays a transformative role in such representations, working alongside gesture, props and setting. Some artists imitate the appearance of an artist from an earlier generation, while others adopt historical, exotic or idiosyncratic clothing deliberately chosen to emphasise their non-conformity and cultivate a particular artistic or bohemian personality. Another way for artists to play with the idea of disguise is to show themselves as the personification of an allegorical figure, producing an image that can then be read on multiple levels.

Sometimes artists incorporate their own portraits into multi-figure narrative scenes. The earliest examples of such embedded portraits emerged in Florence during the Renaissance, when several artists included their image within a fresco cycle or altarpiece, in the same way that they also included portraits of the donor responsible for the commission. Occasionally portraiture and history painting are fused, with the artist playing a role from a mythological or historical story. Disguised self-portraits are also found in many scenes of contemporary life produced in the Netherlands during the seventeenth century.