ジャンカルロ・ドーリアの騎馬像

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.