Memling: Portrait of a Man face swap

Where this one comes from

Hans Memling ran the leading workshop in Bruges in the 1470s, painting the Italian bankers and merchants who filled the city. His innovation was the background: where a Netherlandish portrait had always put its sitter against a flat dark panel, Memling opened a window behind them and painted the countryside. Italian painters saw the results when the pictures came home, and portrait backgrounds were never quite the same again.

What is in the picture

Dark hair to the jaw, a black gown, hands out of frame, and behind him a pale blue-green landscape with trees and the suggestion of a town, receding into haze. The face is modelled with great smoothness and almost no drama, in the manner Memling made his living from: a sitter who looks courteous, composed and entirely unbothered. The landscape is doing something specific — by putting air and distance behind the head, it makes the head feel like a solid object in a real place.

When people use it

For a calm, slightly distant expression with somewhere to be. It suits the message sent from somewhere else, and it is the right face for a polite refusal.

How your face lands in it

Clean, even light, a front-facing head, and a pale background that gives a crisp edge all round: as straightforward a target as this catalogue offers. The dark hair frames closely and does not change. The light in the original is soft and shadowless, so a photograph taken indoors near a window converts better here than anything with strong contrast.

Portrait of a Man — Hans Memling, c. 1470. Hans Memling died in 1494, so the painting has been in the public domain for centuries and a faithful reproduction of it acquires no new rights. Source

Also in: Paintings · Medieval portraits