Dürer's Self-Portrait face swap

Where this one comes from

Albrecht Dürer painted himself in 1500, at twenty-eight, facing straight out of the panel with his hand raised — a symmetrical pose that art of the time reserved almost entirely for images of Christ. Using it for a working painter was an extraordinary claim to make about an artist's standing, and it is still the reason the picture stops people in the Alte Pinakothek.

What is in the picture

Everything is centred: the parting of the hair, the nose, the line of the fur collar, all on one vertical axis against a flat black ground. To the left are his monogram and the date 1500. To the right, in gold, a Latin sentence says that Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg painted himself in his own colours at twenty-eight. The hand he raised to the collar sits just below the crop used here.

When people use it

It is the face of taking yourself completely seriously. It fits the gym selfie posted without a caption, the moment someone answers a small question with a speech, and any photo where the lighting did far more work than the occasion deserved.

How your face lands in it

The hair is the point. Long, coiled, falling well past the shoulders on both sides — you are being handed a haircut you almost certainly do not have. The pose is dead-on and unforgiving about symmetry, so a photo taken straight at the lens works far better here than one at an angle. It is the most formal picture in the catalogue and the one most likely to come out looking like a claim.

Self-Portrait at Twenty-Eight — Albrecht Dürer, 1500. The artist died in 1528, so the painting is in the public domain worldwide, and a faithful photograph of a flat public-domain painting carries no new copyright of its own. Source

Also in: Paintings · Self-portraits · Renaissance