Mozart face swap

Where this one comes from

Barbara Krafft painted this in Salzburg in 1819, twenty-eight years after Mozart died. It was commissioned for a gallery of musicians in Vienna, and she worked from other portraits and from what his surviving family could tell her about the face. His sister was consulted. The result is the image on the chocolate boxes, the concert programmes and most of the record sleeves, and nobody who made it had ever been in a room with him.

What is in the picture

A powdered wig with a queue tied behind, a red coat with gold buttons, lace at the cuff and throat, and a hand resting on a manuscript. The face is pink, smooth, and agreeable in a way that no first-hand description of Mozart quite supports — he was small, pale and marked by childhood smallpox. Krafft was a competent professional painting a memorial rather than a likeness, and the picture is exactly that, done well.

When people use it

For a reputation that has outgrown the person. It suits anything about being famous for the wrong thing, and it is a good face for a confident claim you cannot fully back up.

How your face lands in it

A three-quarter head in even light with the wig standing clear of the forehead and the ears, which leaves the face entirely open and asks nothing of your own hair. One of the simplest swaps here. What comes back is you in a red coat and full eighteenth-century powder, and the wig does all of it.

Portrait of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — Barbara Krafft, 1819. Barbara Krafft died in 1825, so the painting has been in the public domain for well over a century and a faithful photograph of it acquires no rights of its own. Source

Also in: Paintings · Famous people