Portrait équestre de Giancarlo Doria

Rubens spent his twenties in Italy, and around 1606 he was working for the rich merchant families of Genoa. Giovanni Carlo Doria, about 30 and the son of a former doge of the city, sat for this enormous portrait, nearly nine feet tall, mounted on a pale horse rearing up in a controlled riding-school move. On his chest is the red cross of the Spanish order of Santiago, a knighthood granted him by the king of Spain. Rubens was still young, but you can already see the format he would later sell to half the courts of Europe: the sitter raised above you on a powerful animal, cloak and ribbon caught mid-motion. The picture stayed in Genoa, and hangs there still in the Palazzo Spinola.