Young Venetian Woman face swap

Where this one comes from

Dürer made this on his second stay in Venice, in 1505, where he had gone partly to learn and partly because business in Nuremberg was slow. He wrote home from the city that here he was a gentleman and at home a parasite. The panel was left incomplete — the dark background is bare in places and the dress stops rather than ends — and it is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

What is in the picture

Blonde hair in loose waves, parted in the middle and falling to the shoulders, painted strand by strand with the obsessiveness he brought to everything. A thin ribbon holds it back. The dress is low-cut with a black-and-gold hem and a pale chemise beneath it, and a fine chain crosses the chest. The face is round, very young, and painted with a soft Venetian handling he did not use at home — the whole panel is a German engraver learning to paint like an Italian.

When people use it

For a moment that was clearly not the final version. It suits a work in progress, a first draft shown to somebody, and the photo taken before anyone was ready.

How your face lands in it

A frontal, softly lit head with the hair falling clear on both sides and nothing across the face. Reliable. The hair is the loudest thing in the picture and it is not yours, so a short-haired photograph produces a large and usually funny change, and the unfinished ground behind keeps the whole thing looking like a sketch rather than a document.

Portrait of a Young Venetian Woman — Albrecht Dürer, 1505. Albrecht Dürer died in 1528, so the painting has been in the public domain for centuries and the Google Art Project reproduction is published on that basis. Source

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