Genoese School, 17th century

This portrait was executed by an Italian artist working in a Northern idiom. Anthony van Dyck spent some of his most formative years in Genoa, a port city on the Mediterranean with a vibrant Flemish community. His artistic influence on the artists whom he encountered (and on those who encountered his works after his departure) can hardly be overstated. While Van Dyck received commissions for religious and secular works alike, the demand for his grand portraits of the Genoese gentry was exceptionally robust and the legacy of his approach to the genre, in both style of execution and mode of depiction, is immediately apparent in this work.