Ginevra de’ Benci face swap

Where this one comes from

Leonardo painted this in Florence in the mid-1470s, when he was barely into his twenties and still in Verrocchio’s workshop. The sitter is Ginevra de’ Benci, from a banking family, probably painted around her marriage in 1474. The panel was cut down at some point and the bottom third is missing, hands included. It is the only painting by Leonardo in the Americas, bought by Washington in 1967 from the princely house of Liechtenstein.

What is in the picture

The bush behind her head is a juniper, ginepro in Italian, which is a pun on her name, and the painter made sure it takes up most of the picture. Water and trees recede behind it into a pale mist. Her skin is painted with almost no visible transition anywhere, the hair is a tight mass of ringlets at the temples, and the mouth is set in something a long way from pleasure. On the back of the panel, which nobody sees, is a painted wreath and the motto that beauty adorns virtue.

When people use it

For visible reluctance. It is the face for a photograph somebody else insisted on taking, for attending under protest, and for a reply that is technically polite.

How your face lands in it

A large pale face lit flatly from the front, almost square to the viewer, with dark curls close at either side and nothing crossing the features. Among the easiest targets in the catalogue. The finished result keeps the original’s bloodless, matte skin, so a warm or suntanned photograph will come back noticeably cooler than it went in.

Ginevra de’ Benci — Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1474–1478. Leonardo da Vinci died in 1519, so the painting has been in the public domain for centuries, and the museum released its photograph under the CC0 public domain dedication. Source

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