Doge Leonardo Loredan face swap

Where this one comes from

Giovanni Bellini painted Leonardo Loredan shortly after his election as Doge of Venice in 1501, at the start of a reign that would take the republic through the worst war in its history. Venetian doges had always been shown in profile, like a head on a coin; Bellini turned this one to face the viewer, which was new, and set the whole thing against a blue that has not faded in five hundred years. London has owned it since the middle of the nineteenth century.

What is in the picture

The corno ducale — the stiff horned cap of the Venetian head of state — sits over a white linen coif tied under the chin. Below it is a mantle of white and gold brocade fastened with large buttons of the same cloth, painted stitch by stitch. The head is turned a few degrees but the eyes look past you, and the modelling of the face is done in tiny hatched strokes that make an old man’s skin out of what is nearly a mosaic. The background is flat ultramarine.

When people use it

For occupying an office rather than a job. It suits the person appointed to run something, the chair of anything, and any caption written in the third person.

How your face lands in it

A near-frontal head against a flat blue ground, lit evenly from the front, with the cap and the linen coif enclosing it completely on three sides. This is about as controlled a target as the catalogue contains, and almost any straight-on photograph will land in it. Nothing of your own hair appears at all.

Doge Leonardo Loredan — Giovanni Bellini, c. 1501–1504. Giovanni Bellini died in 1516, so the painting has been in the public domain for centuries and a faithful photograph of a flat work that old carries no rights of its own. Source

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