I don’t know the story of Leonardo Davinci /Salai! It’s possible AR was inspired by it, I haven’t seen her mention Salai… Did they do this kind of cute stuff?
Primavera by Botticelli, painted ca. 1482, vs. the first US cover of The Vampire Armand, published 1998.
WHILE WE’RE ON THIS BOTTICELLI TOPIC. I was thinking about the cover for TVA, and a quick google turned out that was ALSO a Botticelli youth! I don’t know how much input, if any, AR had in this cover design. But it’s a Botticelli so we have to assume whoever pulled the trigger on it knew smtg about AR’s affection for Botticelli, especially as applied to describing Armand.
I tried to put it back into the painting, it had to be flipped twice and rotated a bit…
^IDK about the colors, it does look like the TVA cover made his skin a little rosier, but I’m not sure that Wiki had the right colors for their version. The Wiki article says this person is Mercury.
What does it mean that it was flipped upside down and backwards from its original context? What does the cropping off of the helmet mean? Any other thoughts?
My day was very good, thank u! Hope yours was/is, too.
I looked for the painting and I found 3, there are probably even more than that… thanks for pointing these out to me, I hadn’t seen them before, I can definitely see some Armand in each of them.
In all of them I see the “spun amber” hair thing, as David Talbot being a borderline perv including touching him w/o asking first describes Armand in TVA:
“Your hair’s like something spun from amber, as if the amber would melt and could
be drawn from candle flames in long fine airy threads and let to dry that way to make
all these shining tresses. You’re sweet, boylike and pretty as a girl. I wish I had one
glimpse of you in antique velvet the way you were for him, for Marius. I wish I could
see for one moment how it was when you dressed in stockings and wore a belted
doublet sewn with rubies. Look at you, the frosty child. My love doesn’t even touch
you.”
Apply that description to these:
^Portrait of a young man holding a medallion. Altho this one doesn’t resemble Armand to me, it reminded me of his painting the ikons in the caves. “Yeah this took me maybe a half hour… commissions are closed.” Bonus points for the subtle trompe-l’œil effect of his finger sort of out of the frame like that.
^Portrait of a Young Man 3. This is more physically Armand to me, and of the attitude of Armand, who has perfected the very difficult to achieve front-facing side-eye expression. He’s also throwing a gang sign, is that a W for west coast or an E for east coast? Armand is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.
^Portrait of a Young Man. This one has awesome hair, all swirled like that. You might call this portrait boring at first glance but if you give it more of a chance, it has a haunting effect. Is he leaning forward a little? It seems like it. This is more of the coven master face to me than the other two. “If there were a leader… I would be the one.”
You are not alone, there are others out there. People: Comment/Reblog if you ship Lestat/Armand *u* It’s an AU ship for me, I can ship almost anything AU.
They have a bizarre kind of chemistry, don’t they?! If they weren’t both so obsessed with being alpha, they could really enjoy each other.
This is one of the only fanarts I’ve seen of them in any kind of shippiness, and even then, I think it’s the scene in TVL where Lestat is succumbing to Armand’s illusions.
“You know it was the damnedest luck!” I whispered suddenly. “I am an unwilling devil. I cry like some vagrant child. I want to go home.”
[Source unknown, even reverse-image searched. Tell me the source if you know it!]
Anyhow they have referred to eachother in canon as being brothers of a sort, so I tag them #murder brothers, if you want more Lestat/Armand action.
I said to @i-want-my-iwtv I’d do it, here they are. Ship babies for Daniel/Armand and Lestat/Armand. They could not be raised any more differently, if you ask me. Dan/Ar baby would be practically feral considering both parents were pretty wacky during their time together. Les/Ar baby is literally
the worst.
Poor Dan/Ar baby! I think they’d forget to feed it… and the Les/Ar baby would be a holy error. And a holy terror! Both.
Hide and Seek sounds like a fabulous #Coven Game Night activity. Not as violent as paintball, less strategy than Poker… Louis, being a very strategic kind of player, is also excellent at Hiding altho sometimes if he hides somewhere too comfortable, he ends up just taking a nap bc Louis likes taking cat naps.
@gingerhairedimmortal-archived used Caleb Landry Jones as a face claim. I agree w/ the age thing, he definitely could pass for 16, IMO.
There’s a sweetness to him, he’s got some charm.
Can he be bad ass enough? Idk, I haven’t seen him in much. Only Byzantium, which I really did not like, which wasn’t his fault. He wasn’t very remarkable in that movie to me.
This is one of those ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ things, I can’t quite articulate why he doesn’t come near my headcanon for Armand, but hey, he could be a fantastic actor. You’re not the only one who’s suggested him, so I’d screentest him, if it were up to me ;]
I-want-my-IWTV 
