Baroque portrait face swap

What makes a portrait baroque

One light, coming from off to one side, and a great deal of dark. The seventeenth century worked out that a face is most convincing when most of it is in shadow, and built a century of pictures on the discovery — a lit cheek, a jaw falling away into brown, and nothing behind the sitter at all.

The other half of it is that the sitters stopped being types. A baroque portrait will give you a specific tired man on a specific afternoon, which is why a pope who looks suspicious and a painter who looks broke both survived into a century that has no idea who either of them was.

Geographically it is two countries doing it for opposite reasons. Spain made the court version — Velázquez painting a pope, a king and the man he himself held enslaved with the same unhurried attention, which is its own uncomfortable fact — and the Dutch republic made the commercial one, where a brewer could buy the same quality of picture for a fee. Both are here, and the difference shows in the clothing rather than in the light.

Why these are the best ones to use

Directional light is the one thing a phone camera can reproduce without trying. Stand with a window on one side of you and you have already matched the lighting of every painting on this page — which is not true of a Renaissance panel lit evenly from nowhere, or of an outdoor eighteenth-century portrait with sky bouncing up under a hat brim.

These also carry the least costume. A dark coat, a white collar, a cap: there is no wig or ruff doing the recognition for you, so what comes out looks like a portrait of you rather than a portrait of an outfit with your face attached.