The Tailor face swap

Where this one comes from

Giovanni Battista Moroni painted this in Bergamo in the later 1560s, and it is one of the strangest things in sixteenth-century portraiture: a full portrait, at full seriousness, of a tradesman at his bench. Everybody else with a panel this size was a duke or a bishop. Nobody knows the tailor’s name. Titian is supposed to have told patrons in Bergamo to go to Moroni, because Moroni painted people as they actually were. The National Gallery in London has had it since the 1860s.

What is in the picture

He stands behind a table with a length of black cloth chalked ready for cutting and a pair of shears half open in his right hand. The doublet is cream with slashed sleeves and gold-trimmed buttons, better clothing than a tailor would be expected to own, and a red hose shows at the hip. He has stopped and raised his head, and the whole picture is built on that half-second of pause. The background is plain grey-brown and does nothing at all.

When people use it

For being interrupted at work and handling it graciously. It is the picture for a message that starts with sorry to bother you, and for anyone photographed mid-task.

How your face lands in it

A three-quarter head raised slightly towards the viewer, lit from the front left, with short dark hair and a neat beard. Simple to land. The result inherits the upward tilt of the chin and the look of somebody who has been stopped mid-job, which is the specific thing this template is worth using for.

The Tailor (Il Tagliapanni) — Giovanni Battista Moroni, c. 1565–1570. Giovanni Battista Moroni died in 1579, so the painting is long in the public domain and a faithful photograph of it gains no rights of its own. Source

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