Pope Innocent X face swap

Where this one comes from

Velázquez painted this in Rome in 1650, during a second Italian journey he had been sent on to buy pictures for the Spanish king and managed to stretch to two years. Innocent X sat for it while running a papacy that most of Rome disliked him for. The painting has never left the family: it still hangs in the Doria Pamphilj palace, a few rooms from where it was made.

What is in the picture

Almost the whole surface is red and no two of the reds agree — the silk of the shoulder cape, the velvet of the cap, the curtain behind, the upholstery of the chair. Out of the middle of it comes a face flattered nowhere: small wary eyes turned to his left, a heavy jaw, a grey beard going thin. In one hand is a folded paper, and the writing on it is the painter's own signature.

When people use it

It is the face of somebody who has already worked out what you want and decided how little of it you are getting. It fits the reply to a request for an extension, the relative who asks what exactly it is you do for a living, and every photograph taken of a person who did not agree to be photographed.

How your face lands in it

A very large head, close to the picture plane, lit hard from the left and turned perhaps fifteen degrees — one of the best-fitting frames in the catalogue and also the least forgiving, because the original keeps every fold of skin and the swap keeps the light exactly where Velázquez put it. The cap sits far back and covers nothing. What you inherit is the expression, and it has been called the most distrustful in European art.

Portrait of Pope Innocent X — Diego Velázquez, 1650. Diego Velázquez died in 1660, so the work has been in the public domain for centuries. Source

Also in: Paintings · Baroque