Giovanni Battista Ortolani Damon

The way Giovanni Battista Ortolani Damon painted faces, you’d swear his sitters were about to speak—until you noticed his backgrounds, always a little too crisp, like someone had ironed the air. He spent the early 1800s in Moscow, where Moscow nobles paid him to flatter them into looking more European than they felt. One of these efforts, *Portrait of Prince Sergei Golitsyn* (1805), shows the prince in a blue coat so polished it could double as a mirror. Hunt this down in Gallery Tiles and watch how the sitter’s eyes follow you, while the room behind him stays stubbornly flat.