Gio. Paolo Balbi on horseback

The young man on the rearing horse was about twenty when Anthony van Dyck painted him, towards the end of the years the painter spent working in Genoa. Giovanni Paolo Balbi came from one of the city's banking families.

Twenty years later he was at the centre of a plot to let French troops into Genoa at night, through the walls on the Sarzano side of the city. A fellow conspirator sold the papers to the government in May 1648. Balbi got away. The Republic sentenced him to death in his absence, confiscated his property and banished his children, and that July printed his likeness on a proclamation with a reward on it, more money for killing him than for handing him over alive.

An inventory drawn up by his brother Bartolomeo the following year records that the portrait had been taken out of the family house for being unworthy of standing there. A later relative, Francesco Maria Balbi, found a tidier answer and had a painter called Simone De Bovis put his own face on the body, so the picture could stay on the wall with a different man in the saddle. The canvas was sold in 1974 and cleaned, and Gio. Paolo came back out from under him.