Elizabeth I face swap

Where this one comes from

Painted soon after the summer of 1588, when a Spanish invasion fleet was scattered by English fireships and then wrecked by weather on its way home. The picture is less a portrait than a press release: the queen in the middle, the news in the windows, the world under one hand. Three versions of it survive, and the one used here is the largest and the least cut down.

What is in the picture

Two windows open behind her onto the same fortnight — English fireships going in on the left, Spanish hulls breaking up on a rocky coast on the right. Between them she wears a ruff the diameter of a cartwheel and more pearls than the rest of this catalogue put together, and her hand rests on a globe with the fingers laid across the Americas. An imperial crown sits on the table beside her, conspicuously not on her head.

When people use it

It is the face of having won and wanting the room to hear the details. It fits the message sent after a plan somebody doubted has come off, the person who brings receipts to a settled argument, and any photo taken on a day that went entirely your way.

How your face lands in it

The ruff frames the head for you — a stiff white-and-gold disc running all the way round it, so nothing of your own hair or shoulders gets into the picture. The face is close to square-on and lit flat and hard, with almost no modelling anywhere: that is the ageless mask the court required of a woman of fifty-five, and it means an ordinary front-lit photograph drops in here more cleanly than into anything painted with real shadow.

Elizabeth I (the Armada Portrait) — British School, formerly attributed to George Gower, c. 1588. Painted in the sixteenth century by an unidentified hand; the work has been in the public domain for centuries. Source

Also in: Paintings · Royal portraits · Tudor portraits