Christ of the Coin

In the mid-1620s Van Dyck was a young Fleming making his name in Genoa, where the city's merchant princes queued to be painted by him. Between those grand portraits he made this. Christ, pressed by his questioners on whether Jews should pay Rome's tax, holds up the coin and answers that Caesar should be given what is Caesar's. Van Dyck had studied in Venice, and it shows in the warm, loaded colour and the tight knot of heads in shadow. He was working from Titian, who had painted the same scene for Philip II of Spain, a canvas now in London. Van Dyck's version has stayed in Genoa ever since, in one of the old family palaces on the Strada Nuova.