don't be afraid. just start the tape.

I was browsing through the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, looking for any potential Armand pieces. No real standouts, until I found a curious entry.

The Palazzo di San Martino Gusnago (now Palazzo Pastore) lies just outside the small city of Mantua, and in the 16th century, it would have been maybe ten days travel from Venice (depending on how you made the journey). In a small room in this palazzo, you would have been greeted by an interesting decor choice: the exposed central beam and the upper portions of the walls were lined with faces. Portraits of random men and women, real or imagined--all done, it would seem, by the same unknown painter. There were once at least 44 in total, though some have disappeared and others have been divided among the world’s art museums. The Met has 12 of them.

The paintings have been studied a little, though not extensively, and there has been little consensus on who may have painted them or when. The Met has likely not photographed the pieces in decades, as no images are available in color. According to the exhibition history the Met provides, none of their twelve panels have been on public display since 1947. This may be because they're in delicate condition; a lot of chipping and cracking is visible in the Met's old black-and-white photos. Tempera can be a brittle medium, made all the worse on a wood panel that expands and contracts with changes in humidity and temperature. And so, these twelve mysterious portraits are stowed away in the depths of the Met's vast storage, largely forgotten.

Of the 12 panels in the Met's collection, I liked Number 8 the best. This, I thought, could be a very badly whitewashed Armand-- the face shape and features like the mouth and eyes could work, as would the shoulder-length dark curls, but the anonymous youth in the painting was much too pale, and the nose wasn't quite right. But then I remembered I have an iPad and rudimentary digital art skills. After adjusting the shape of the nose, I essentially used the same process as digital artists who lay down values in grayscale and then go back and add color. I think I ended up with 15-17 layers of various blend modes and opacities.