Andrea del Sarto face swap

Where this one comes from

Andrea del Sarto painted himself in Florence around 1528, two years before plague killed him at forty-three. Vasari, who had been his pupil, wrote that he was the painter without errors — and then spent the rest of the passage explaining that he lacked nerve, took no risks and let his wife run him. Three hundred years later Robert Browning turned that verdict into a poem, and the line about a man’s reach exceeding his grasp comes from it. The panel is in the Uffizi.

What is in the picture

A dark cap pulled low, a brown overshirt, a plain grey-green ground, and a face turned to look straight out of the picture with an expression somewhere between tired and defensive. The surface is worn and the panel has a crack running through it. There is no brush, no palette and no sign of the profession anywhere — unusual for a self-portrait of the period, and consistent with a man Vasari accused of having no ambition for his own reputation.

When people use it

For being extremely good at something that is not quite enough. It suits the competent result nobody will remember, and any caption about doing the job properly and going home.

How your face lands in it

A large frontal head lit softly from the front with a low cap cutting across the forehead and closing the top of the frame. One of the simpler targets here. The surface damage and the crack remain over the finished face, which gives the result a genuinely old look that a clean high-resolution panel cannot.

Self-portrait — Andrea del Sarto, c. 1528. Andrea del Sarto died in 1530, so the painting has been in the public domain for centuries and a faithful photograph of it gains no rights of its own. Source

Also in: Paintings · Self-portraits · Renaissance