Charles VII face swap

Where this one comes from

Jean Fouquet painted this around 1445, a few years after the Hundred Years' War had finally turned France's way, and the frame says so in gold letters: le tres victorieux roy de France. Fouquet had travelled to Italy and come home with a way of modelling a head that nobody north of the Alps was using yet. The panel hangs in the Louvre, and it is usually described as the first French portrait that looks at its sitter rather than at his office.

What is in the picture

A heavy-lidded man in a red houppelande, wedged forward between two pale curtains that someone has drawn back a hand's width on either side. The blue hat is the only cheerful object in the picture. This is the king Joan of Arc had crowned at Reims sixteen years before, and by the time the panel was painted he had taken Normandy back; the caption boasts about it while the face declines to. His hands rest on a ledge along the bottom edge, a Flemish device for making a painted panel behave like a window.

When people use it

The picture for good news received badly. It fits the moment a long argument finally goes your way and you are too worn out to enjoy it, and it is the reaction shot for any announcement that arrives three years late.

How your face lands in it

He faces you almost square on, lit flatly from the front, and the head fills a good quarter of the panel, which puts this at the easy end of the range. The curtains and the hat frame your face without crossing it. What carries over from the original is the set of the mouth, so a neutral photograph gives you the whole effect and a broad smile argues with the picture.

Charles VII of France — Jean Fouquet, c. 1445. Jean Fouquet died around 1481, so the painting has been in the public domain for centuries, and a faithful photograph of a flat work that old carries no new rights of its own. Source

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