Bildnis des Andrea Doria als Neptun

Andrea Doria was the admiral who effectively ruled Genoa, and when Bronzino painted him around the 1540s he did something startling for a portrait of a living statesman. He stripped him naked and turned him into Neptune, god of the sea, in the old classical way of honouring a great man with heroic nudity. Doria grips a trident and gathers a falling sail into a scrap of loincloth, his name carved in gold on the mast behind him. Look closely at the trident and you can still trace, faintly beneath it, the squared oar he first held, the sign of his command over his own fleet, which a later hand painted over. He was well into his seventies here, standing in for a god of the sea he had spent his life fighting on.