Portrait of a Genovese Gentleman

For more than 200 years this old man and a woman in a companion canvas were taken for husband and wife. The two pictures were already together in the Palazzo Balbi in Genoa by the early 18th century, were bought in 1828, through the painter David Wilkie, by the English collector and politician Sir Robert Peel, and reached Berlin as a pair in 1901. Research has since separated them. She wears the hair of a widow, sits noticeably higher in her picture than he does in his, and a 17th-century copy proves her canvas was once wider on the left and had been trimmed to match the width of his.

The Gemaldegalerie now names him. He is Alessandro Giustiniani-Longo, Doge of the Genoese republic from 1611 to 1613 and afterwards its procurator for life, the officer who ran its finances. Van Dyck painted him in Genoa around 1622 and 1623, when he was in his late seventies. The rolled paper in his right hand and the black cap belong to that office.