Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror face swap

Where this one comes from

Parmigianino was twenty-one in 1524 and wanted work in Rome. So he looked into a barber’s convex mirror, had a wooden ball sawn in half, and painted exactly what the mirror did — on a curved surface of the same shape, so the distortion would be real rather than described. Vasari says he took it to Pope Clement VII, who was suitably amazed. It is in Vienna, and a twentieth-century poem about it ran to fifteen pages and won three prizes.

What is in the picture

A round panel, no bigger than a dinner plate, curving outwards. The hand nearest the mirror swells to twice the size it should be and sweeps across the whole lower half of the picture, the room bends away behind, and a window frame curves where it ought to be straight. In the middle of all of it the face is undistorted, calm and slightly amused, because the centre of a convex mirror is the one place that stays true.

When people use it

For a selfie taken far too close to the lens. It is the only picture here that is actually about the mechanics of looking at yourself, and it fits any joke about camera angles.

How your face lands in it

The face sits in the centre of the tondo where the curvature is least, which means it drops in cleanly and the distortion stays in the hand and the room where it belongs. Light is soft and frontal. Use a photograph taken at normal distance — the picture already supplies all the lens-warp anybody needs.

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror — Parmigianino, c. 1523–1524. Parmigianino died in 1540, so the painting has been in the public domain for centuries and a faithful reproduction of it gains no new copyright. Source

Also in: Paintings · Self-portraits · Renaissance