Portrait of Geronima Sale Brignole with her daughter Maria Aurelia

Anthony van Dyck was still in his twenties when he settled in Genoa, a Flemish outsider who spent about six years painting the city's merchant-banking families. Genoa had grown rich lending money to the Spanish crown, and its leading houses wanted portraits to match, so Van Dyck gave them towering full-length canvases that lent bankers' wives the bearing of reigning queens. This is one of them. Geronima Sale Brignole stands well over life-size in heavy silk, her small daughter Aurelia at her side. Her husband paid for the picture in 1627, the last year Van Dyck worked in the city before moving north. The Brignole family kept it in their palace for generations. When the last of the line left the house to the city of Genoa, the portrait stayed where it had always hung.