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Souvenir Of The Week: World's First Duckface

by Megan Fernandez (RSS feed) on Mar 13th 2013 at 1:00PM

Among the Michelangeos, the Raphaels, the Caravaggios and other Renaissance masterpieces at the The Uffizi Gallery in Florence, open to the public since 1591, one Bottecelli painting, "Portrait of a Young Man With a Medal," captures an unidentified subject's "boo-yah" moment posing with a medallion of some sort. His face is snappishly angled and his lips puckered in a timeless "I'm all that and a bag of Skittles" expression. The features have been described as "the small covetous eyes, the ignoble nose, the pursed animal mouth..." The pursed animal mouth! In other words, Gawker fans, the composition created in 1475 could be the world's earliest example of duckface. Don't leave without a postcard from the gift shop.

[Photo credit: Kasey Cornwell]

Filed under: Arts and Culture, Europe, Italy

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