Georg Gisze face swap

Where this one comes from

Holbein painted this in London in 1532 for Georg Gisze, a merchant from Danzig working out of the Steelyard, the walled Hanseatic trading compound on the Thames. He was thirty-four. Holbein painted a number of the Steelyard men in the early 1530s, before the English court work took over, and this is the most elaborate of them. It is in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin.

What is in the picture

Count the objects: a Venetian glass vase with carnations and rosemary, a gold coin balance, a signet ring, a pewter inkstand, sealing wax, scissors, a ball of red twine, a spherical clock, a rack of letters, a book of accounts, and a Turkish carpet under all of it. Notes pinned to the wall carry his name and his address in London. Above his head is a motto: no joy without sorrow. The man himself is in a pink silk shirt and a black cap, and he is nearly outnumbered.

When people use it

For a desk that is proof of something. It suits the workspace photograph, the tools-of-the-trade post, and any joke about a person whose identity is mostly their job.

How your face lands in it

A three-quarter head lit from the left, small in a crowded frame, with a cap sitting back off the forehead. The background does so much work that the result reads as a whole scene rather than a portrait, which is the point of picking it. Bring a sharp photograph — at this scale a soft one is noticeably softer than everything around it.

The Merchant Georg Gisze — Hans Holbein the Younger, 1532. Hans Holbein the Younger died in 1543, so the painting has been in the public domain for centuries, and a faithful photograph of it gains no rights of its own. Source

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