A Man in Armor

Genoa in the 1620s was a republic of bankers. Its great families lent the money that kept the Spanish crown at war, and the same families supplied the commanders who spent it, so armour in a Genoese palace was as much a family business as a uniform.

This portrait comes out of exactly that world. Van Dyck worked in Genoa for several years in the 1620s, painting one patrician household after another, and this canvas was first recorded there in the late 1600s. Its owners belonged either to the Spinola or the Balbi family, which is as close as anyone has come to naming the old man in the armour. He stands beside a classical column, a stock prop in this kind of portrait, meant to say that the sitter was learned as well as noble.

The Cincinnati Art Museum, which dates the picture to somewhere between 1621 and 1627, still lists the sitter as unknown.