Portrait of Marcello Durazzo

This canvas is half of a married pair that no longer stands together. Marcello Durazzo, a Genoese patrician born in 1593, was painted full length in black beside a stone column, and his wife Caterina Balbi was painted to match on a canvas of almost the same size, both around 1624. They stayed in the family's hands in Genoa for generations. Caterina is still there, in the Palazzo Reale. Marcello ended up in Venice.

He got there through Baron Giorgio Franchetti, who bought the Ca' d'Oro on the Grand Canal in the 1890s, spent years restoring the Gothic palace, and left it with his collection to the Italian state. It opened to the public as a gallery in 1927. Behind the sitter a red curtain is pulled back on a strip of clouded sky, which the gallery reads as van Dyck acknowledging Venetian painting, years before the picture would hang in Venice. A cleaning in 2018 lifted off the heavy retouching and glazing that earlier restorers had spread across the surface.