Napoleon face swap

Where this one comes from

Andrea Appiani was the official painter of Napoleon’s Italian kingdom and made this in 1805, the year Napoleon set the iron crown of Lombardy on his own head in Milan cathedral. It is an image built to do the work official portraits do: hung in halls, copied by lesser hands, engraved for the enormous number of people who would never be in a room with him.

What is in the picture

Green velvet stitched with gold, a lace jabot, a chest of orders, and a crown parked on a cushion in the lower corner where you cannot miss it. He was thirty-six. Appiani lit him like a stage: everything glitters except the face, which is painted plainly and turned up and away, so that in a picture stuffed with metal and embroidery the least expensive surface in it is the one your eye goes to.

When people use it

For announcing something about yourself that nobody asked to hear. It is the correct picture for a promotion post, a new title, or any sentence beginning with the words as of today I am.

How your face lands in it

His head is tipped back a little and turned, lit cleanly from the left, and it sits against a dark arch with nothing overlapping it, which makes for a straightforward result. The hair comes forward onto the forehead in the famous comma and it stays there. Because the chin is raised in the original, a photograph taken from slightly below matches the angle better than one shot down at you.

Napoleon I as King of Italy — Andrea Appiani, 1805. Andrea Appiani died in 1817, so the painting has been in the public domain everywhere for well over a century, and the reproduction of it is published on the same basis. Source

Also in: Paintings · Royal portraits