Portrait of Filips de Godines

Around 1500 the king of Portugal moved his trading post in the Low Countries to Antwerp, and the city became the northern end of the Portuguese spice route, where pepper and cinnamon from Asia were sold on to the rest of Europe. The Portuguese merchants there formed a nation of their own, with elected consuls and a house the city gave them. More than a century later, families of Portuguese origin still belonged to Antwerp's moneyed class, and Filips Godines came from one of them. The Alte Pinakothek admires how van Dyck caught his Mediterranean looks, and reads the man's self-assurance straight off his figure, which it calls, quite literally, weighty. He stands full length on a canvas more than two metres tall, painted around 1630 as a pair with his wife, Sebilla vanden Berghe. Both portraits came from the old electoral gallery in Munich, and today they hang in the same room.