Young Man Holding a Roundel face swap

Where this one comes from

Botticelli made this in Florence around 1480, and the object the sitter is holding is not painted at all — it is a real gilded roundel from the previous century, cut out and set into the panel, showing a saint. The picture spent most of the twentieth century barely noticed in English country houses. In January 2021 it sold in New York for ninety-two million dollars, which at the time made it the most expensive old master ever auctioned but one.

What is in the picture

Flat blue sky behind a stone window frame, a plain dark tunic, a great deal of reddish-gold hair, and two long hands holding the roundel out towards you at chest height. Nobody knows who he is. The face is modelled with the particular Florentine hardness of the 1480s — outline first, colour second — and the mouth is set in a way that has been read as arrogance by roughly half the people who have written about it and as boredom by the rest.

When people use it

For presenting something you did not make and are pleased with anyway. It fits a share, a repost or a recommendation, and it is the face for holding up a thing and saying nothing about it.

How your face lands in it

A front-facing head in flat, even daylight against pale blue, with hair falling on both sides and nothing crossing the face. That is close to ideal conditions. The hair is long, thick and stays exactly as it is, so a short-haired photograph produces the biggest visible change of any template on this site apart from the wigs.

Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Roundel — Sandro Botticelli, c. 1480. Sandro Botticelli died in 1510, so the painting has been in the public domain for centuries and the photographic reproduction of it carries no separate rights. Source

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