A Genoese Lady with Her Child

When Anthony van Dyck painted this, he was barely into his twenties and a long way from home. He had left Antwerp and Rubens's studio for Italy, and settled for a stretch in Genoa, a small republic grown rich lending money to the Spanish crown. Its banking families wanted portraits that matched that wealth, and van Dyck gave them a new kind: tall, columned, the sitter set high so you look up at her. We don't know her name. She wears the stiff black silk and wide ruff of Spanish court fashion, which Genoa followed closely. The living moment is the child, reaching up out of the ceremony toward its mother. Van Dyck kept that small gesture in a picture otherwise built for grandeur, and it is the thing your eye keeps returning to.