Titian face swap

Where this one comes from

Titian painted this in Venice around 1562, when he had been the leading painter in Europe for forty years and was working almost exclusively for Philip II of Spain. It was not a commission. He kept it in the house, and the composition — turned away, not addressing the viewer, brush in hand — is what somebody paints when nobody is going to hang it in an embassy. It is in the Prado.

What is in the picture

Black cap, black robe, white beard, and the gold chain of the knighthood Charles V gave him in 1533. He is turned well away from the viewer in near profile, looking off into the room, and the brush in his hand is almost dissolved into the background. The late handling is famously loose — broken, scrubbed, half-abandoned passages that resolve at a distance — and it was already being called unfinished by contemporaries who had not stepped back far enough.

When people use it

For being finished with proving things. It suits a late-career note, an anniversary of doing something for a long time, and anyone who has stopped explaining themselves.

How your face lands in it

The head is turned further from the camera than almost anything else here, which means a straight-on photograph will visibly fight it. Use one taken from an angle if you can. The cap and the full white beard both stay, so what comes back is you as a seventy-year-old Venetian regardless of your age, which is either the appeal or the problem.

Self-portrait — Titian, c. 1562. Titian died in 1576, so the painting has been in the public domain for centuries and the museum photograph of it carries no separate copyright. Source

Also in: Paintings · Self-portraits · Renaissance