The Halberdier face swap

Where this one comes from

Pontormo painted this in Florence around 1529, while the city was under siege by imperial troops and its young men were being handed weapons. The sitter is generally identified as Francesco Guardi, a Florentine boy of about fifteen who served in the defence; an older theory made him Cosimo de’ Medici. In 1989 it sold for thirty-five million dollars, then the most anyone had paid at auction for an old master, and it is now at the Getty in Los Angeles.

What is in the picture

Acid green behind him, a red cap, a doublet of pale gold, a gold chain, and a halberd held upright in one hand with the blade running out of the top of the frame. The proportions are stretched the way Mannerist figures always are — a long neck, small head, narrow shoulders — and the colours are deliberately unstable, a palette borrowed from fresco and used on a panel. The face is young enough that the armour would not have fitted.

When people use it

For standing guard over something trivial. It suits the person defending a position nobody is attacking, and it is the face for taking your turn on a rota extremely seriously.

How your face lands in it

A near-frontal head, evenly lit, with the red cap sitting back and the hair short underneath it. Easy geometry, unusual colour: the surrounding greens and golds push the finished skin tone somewhere cooler and more artificial than an ordinary photograph starts out. That is the picture doing what it does, not the swap going wrong.

Portrait of a Halberdier (Francesco Guardi?) — Pontormo, c. 1528–1530. Pontormo died in 1557, so the painting has been in the public domain for centuries and the museum photograph of it carries no separate rights. Source

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