Man in a Red Cap face swap

Where this one comes from

Antonello da Messina produced a run of small male portraits in Venice in the mid-1470s, all built to the same specification: a plain dark ground, a parapet along the bottom edge, and a head turned slightly with the eyes coming straight back at the viewer. This one is in the National Gallery in London and the gallery simply calls it a portrait of a man. Nobody has ever established who any of them were.

What is in the picture

A red woollen cap of the kind worn all over the Mediterranean, dark hair cut level at the ears, a brown doublet, and a white shirt showing at the neck. The corners of the mouth are turned up by an amount so small it took later writers a page each to describe, and the eyes are entirely direct. A stone ledge crosses the bottom of the panel with a slip of paper on it — a cartellino — where the painter signed his work.

When people use it

For being quietly entertained by a situation. It is the mildest amusement anybody managed to paint in the fifteenth century and it suits a dry comment perfectly.

How your face lands in it

A large three-quarter head against black, softly lit from the left, with a cap that covers the hairline and a collar closing the bottom. Mechanically one of the best targets here. The faint upward set of the mouth belongs to the panel and survives the swap, so even a deadpan photograph comes back looking mildly pleased.

Portrait of a Man — Antonello da Messina, c. 1475–1476. Antonello da Messina died in 1479, so the painting has been in the public domain for centuries and the gallery photograph of it carries no separate rights. Source

Also in: Paintings · Renaissance