The Lomellini Family

Van Dyck spent most of the 1620s in Genoa, still in his twenties, painting the richest families of the republic at full length and life size. This is the grandest of them. It was ordered by Giacomo Lomellini, who was then the Doge, the elected head of the Genoese state, and yet you will not find him in his own family portrait. A sitting Doge was forbidden to have himself painted, to stop him building a personal cult. So his second wife stands among their children in his place, dressed in the heavy silks of Genoese wealth, while the man who paid for the whole picture is deliberately absent from it.